Young Writers Society

When Blake opened his eyes, he was greeted by blindingly bright light. His hands immediately shot up to cover his eyes. It wasn't painful in the same way the arrow that Herobrine had shoved into his eye had been, but it still made him stumbled back into the wall behind him.

The last thing he remembered was being in the cell. Had the endermen taken him out? Was this some kind of weird punishment? He didn't realize the End had light that could be so bright.

"Circe?" he said.

There wasn't any response.

Hoping that his eyes had finally adjusted to the light, he peeked through his fingers. To his surprise, he could make wooden block walls and fingers that looked thankfully human.

Blake let out a sigh of relief. He was dreaming right now. This was the old tutorial world in Minecraft that he always ended up in with May.




He must have fallen asleep in the End. It wasn't an escape, but it was something.

He straightened, green eyes bright and excited. It could be an escape. He just needed to find May. He started for the door with a smile on her face. He could tell her where the endermen had taken him and then he could-

He stopped.

What was he thinking? She already knew where he was. It wasn't like endermen would take someone to the Nether. He couldn't even tell her where in the End he was. All he could do was say he was there with Circe, but even that was useless. May didn't know who Circe was.

He groaned.

Maybe, if he was lucky, they'd be able to come up with some kind of escape plan tonight. It was better than nothing—even if they just came up with a plan to make a better plan.

He opened the door. He also needed to tell her what Circe had told him, too. He still hadn't entirely processed that. May probably was, but she was...different. She had always seen spirits differently-

He stopped just a foot out the door.

There was someone standing underneath the entrance arch just a few feet away. It wasn't May. It was a man in his early twenties, with dark brown hair and deep green eyes. He seemed taller than he had when they last met, despite that last meeting have only happened just days before all of this. It felt so wrong standing there in just his button-up blue pajamas and bare feet. He had never wanted his armor so badly before.

"Nikolai?" Blake whispered.

It didn't take much for Nikolai to figure out this wasn't going as planned.

He'd been nervous going through with this, but now he just felt confused. He was supposed to be asleep somewhere while he sorted through his memories, thanks to the alchemist guild. He should be revisiting key moments in his past life that took place before his amnesia right now. But Nikolai found himself standing under an arch that was made entirely out of strangely cubic stone, instead of a setting that would have felt familiar.

In fact, everything seemed to be made up of blocks as far as Nikolai could see. The terrain was all the same shade of grass green, all of the edges perfectly straight with right angles at the corners. He squinted up at the sky. Even the sun was square.

Something had gone terribly wrong, and he wasn't where he was meant to be. How could he wake up to let them know? Maybe this had been a bad idea all along. Maybe he should've taken more time to think before he'd run off and left behind the only people who might really know him.

This wasn't fair. It should've gotten better after the caves, but it hadn't.

Nikolai took a deep breath to steady himself and turned around to face the other way. He seemed to be standing on the roof of a stone building, from what he could tell. It had to be worth trying to explore around a bit before he got out.

But his plans changed the moment he heard his name being called.

Nikolai spun around slowly, his gaze landing on the boy who had just spoken. He looked young, with eyes the same color as Nikolai but with darker hair and a little shorter. He was also dressed for bed, which struck him as strange, given that it was daytime here— the square sun was still high above their heads, though it seemed to be moving at a visible rate.

Did this boy know him? This couldn't be one of his memories. This entire world was wrong.

"Who are you?" Nikolai asked slowly. "Do I know you?"

"No," Blake quickly said.

The dismissal wasn't really out of habit. He hadn't ever been in a situation like this before. He had only shared his dreams with May. Even more than that, he had never met someone who had seen him like that and then seen him like this. It was more instinct than anything else. Trust didn't come easy to him. Telling May the truth had felt like pulling nails. Telling Bartimaeus his actual name had given him an anxious stomachache the rest of the morning.

(Even though he didn't have a stomach anymore.)

But when he looked at Nikolai, all he could think about was the conversation they had back when they first met. They had to trust each other back then. It was the only way to get out of the caves. He didn't technically need to do that now. This was just a dream, and he knew he'd wake up at the end of it. He wouldn't have to keep facing Nikolai.

Blake bit his lip.

So why was he feeling so guilty when he tried to come up with a reason for why he would know Nikolai's name?

Blake took a deep, unsteady breath.

It's like a band-aid, he thought. I just have to rip it off.

"No, that's wrong," Blake admitted. He covered his face with his hands and ducked his head down. It was a poor substitute for a helmet, but it helped him pretend that Nikolai wouldn't be able to read his face so well. "You do know me. We met in the caves. The only reason you don't recognize me right now is because we're both dreaming. This is what I actually look like, not-"

Blake faltered.

Nikolai frowned in confusion. There had been several people in the caves, but no one as young as him. The youngest person there would have been at least a few years older than this boy.

"That doesn't line up," he said. "No one from the caves should be here, anyway. This is supposed to be a memory, but..." He trailed off.

The boy had said he looked different here; not only that, but it was how he really looked. Nikolai didn't think he looked even vaguely familiar. Maybe one of the heartseekers could change their appearance somehow and this was them? But Nikolai didn't know any of them well.

There had only been one person in the caves he'd started to actually know.

A thought occurred to him, and his eyes went wide. Nikolai hesitantly took a few steps closer. The boy was covering his face, avoiding eye contact, like he didn't want to be seen at all.

He looked like someone who was missing his armor right now.

"Raptor...?" Nikolai asked uncertainly.

Blake peeked through his fingers.

He didn't understand what Nikolai meant by his memory comment, but he was more focused on how quickly Nikolai figured out who he was. Part of Blake had been hoping that he would. It was easier than trying to explain it himself. He had liked when May had filled in the blanks just yesterday—it was easier than when he had to tell Bartimaeus everything.

He nodded.

"I'm Raptor," he confirmed. He lowered his hands and looked up at Nikolai. It was disorientating looking up instead of down at him after towering over him the entire time they were in the caves. "This...doesn't make sense for me, either. I've only shared my dreams with one person before. I don't know how you're here right now."

"I... don't know either," Nikolai said. "However it happened, I wasn't trying to do that."

He'd thought it wouldn't even be possible to see Raptor again. They'd been separated ever since they'd escaped and gotten tossed back in their own worlds. Nikolai had wanted to find him again at first, but soon enough he'd had to accept it wasn't going to happen. Even now, they still weren't meeting face-to-face.

But he didn't want Raptor to think he hadn't wanted to see him.

"I mean... no, sorry. I wasn't trying to join a dream of yours, I didn't even know that was possible. But I didn't think there was a way at all for us to run into each other, so I wasn't looking for one, but..." Nikolai paused. "I am glad I'm seeing you again, Raptor. I really am."

He looked around the landscape of blocks again.

"Still, it doesn't change that I'm supposed to be somewhere very different."

When Nikolai said he hadn't been trying to find a way for them to meet, Blake's chest felt tight for reasons that he didn't understand. The feeling went away as soon as Nikolai clarified that he was happy they had accidentally met again. Blake tried not to put much thought in it, but his chest still felt off. Like it was still hollow and made of bones, not filled with a beating heart.

Blake thought for a moment. He tried to ignore the lingering feeling in his chest.

"Maybe it was the gods," he guessed. "That was how May explained it when we first met. She's the friend that I usually share my dreams with. She went to a summer camp where other campers were children of the Greek gods. She wasn't, but she said that those campers sometimes shared dreams."

Nikolai raised his eyebrows. Greek gods?

He'd heard of some mythology once, clearly, because it wasn't a completely unfamiliar term to him. But... well, wasn't that stuff old and all stories anyway? There was plenty of Slavic mythology and lore, but he didn't believe in those legends any more than the Greek ones.

"I don't understand," Nikolai said. Maybe Raptor had said something else and he'd mistranslated it. "What gods?" He also wanted to ask about May and who she was, but he decided to save that question for later.

Blake, admittedly, also didn't entirely understand. The gods were more of May's life than his. Already knowing about magic and spirits made the gods easier to comprehend, but he hadn't ever met one before. He didn't really know what they were truly like.

"...I'm not sure," he finally said. "May was never able to figure out which one. It might have been Hypnos. He's the god of sleep."

There was another guess, too, but it felt silly bringing something like that up now. Nikolai was already seeing him like a kid. Talking about May's other theory with a straight face was just going to make him seem even less capable.

"Who?" Nikolai asked. He had to be misunderstanding something.

The guilds, from everything he'd recently learned-- relearned-- didn't owe their abilities to any higher power. That meant that the alchemists didn't act on behalf of any god, either. He couldn't be here because of some old legend. Why was Raptor jumping to that conclusion?

"Wait, do you believe in that?" he asked, trying his best to sound curious, not judgmental. "That's fine if you do, but I'm just not sure where this idea is coming from."

Blake was starting to realize this was going to be harder to explain than he thought.

"I don't...technically believe in them," he said. Nikolai didn't really sound judgemental, but Blake still felt sheepish explaining something like the existence of the Greek pantheon while wearing his pajamas. "I know they exist, but I don't worship them."

He thought for a moment.

"Where I'm from, they're the only explanation for why people can share dreams. My-The spirit kind of magic has nothing to do with dreams. Minecraft doesn't have anything that explains it, either, and May and I shared our dreams before we ended up there. May knows people who have shared dreams before, and those dreams always had to do with the Greek gods."

He looked Nikolai over.

"I know you have different magic than what I know of," Blake hesitantly said, remembering the strange orbs he had thrown back in the caves. "I'm guessing you have a different explanation for this. But the only reason I could be here is because of some godly intervention."

Nikolai hesitated, wondering how he was going to explain his perspective.

Raptor was right about the magic, and he'd figured out how it worked for him, but it felt a little off-topic right now. Even if it was, he wasn't sure how exactly to say it. So he decided maybe the guild that had helped him was a good place to start.

"Yeah," he said, with a slow nod. "I got some help from some people like me-- not the same as me, in terms of magic, because they belong to a different group of magic-users. Their abilities seemed the most helpful for getting the memories I lost back, so I traveled a long way to find them. And their powers connect sleep and memory, so they made me dream to make me remember them again."

But obviously something had gone wrong.

"This is supposed to be a landscape of my lost memories, going from the earliest ones to the ones I had right before my amnesia," Nikolai said. "And I'll wake up with all of them when it's over. But there's no way this world is a memory of mine."

"Oh," Blake said.

He knew he should have said more. He wanted to say more. He was happy that Nikolai was closer to remembering who he had been before the caves. But all that Blake could think about was why something like this would even happen in the first place—something or someone must have caused the magic from Nikolai's world to work in a different way than expected.

Blake couldn't shake the feeling that someone was him.

He took a deep breath and tried to push the feeling away.

"I don't know why the magic isn't working the way it's supposed to," he said, somehow feeling even more worse than he had when he had kept secrets back in the cave, "but I know where we are right now. We're in the tutorial world for Minecraft. It hasn't been used for years, but May and I always meet here in our dreams."

Nikolai felt a smile tugging at his lips, and he wasn't sure why. But soon he remembered hearing about Minecraft from Raptor, back in the caves. He hadn't realized it was a world of its own-- a strange world, since everything was cubic as far as the eye could see and the sun was setting rapidly enough that he could hardly keep up, but a world all the same.

"Minecraft," he said. "That's the... you called it a video game, right?" His Russian accent came through on the word video, and he messed up on the pronunciation a bit. Nikolai hadn't familiarized himself with those sounds yet.

Not an opera, he reminded himself. Although it'd make an interesting ballet name.