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Your vision spins in all hazes of purple the visible spectrum of light has to offer. Trees, grass, the night sky above you, they all begin to warp in a horribly sickening way. You shouldn’t mind it, it’s your choice. There’s nothing much to leave behind. Not far is your base, bed tucked against a corner, all of your chests filled with items. The farm with your livestock is mercifully free from any threats of monsters come to cause trouble. It’s… peaceful. It is peaceful, you tell yourself. Nothing to worry about, nothing except for the nausea as the world around you morphs from green into a hellish red. The air thins, and your lungs fill with the sensation of needing to cough, but are tortured by the inability to do so. Just on the edge of release as your vision swims back to more clarity, and every inhale stings and brings tears to the back of your eyes.
You stumble out of the portal, desperate to cough to clear your lungs of the smog, barely hacking just once in an attempt of relief. The air swelters and suffocates you, your skin burning with the heat of it. You look around, and blink blearily, seeing a ceiling of glowstone and bedrock. The peak of elevation stretches so far above you, that maybe if you’d brought more blocks to pillar with, you could touch the glowstone, feel its powder dust your skin. It’s a fleeting thought as you turn back towards the portal, apprehensively preparing to place cobblestone down. You pause, look out towards the lava sea, bubbling menacingly before you. Right, there are no monsters. Just me. It is peaceful.
You try to convince yourself of your safety, try to reassure yourself that the portal won’t disappear or be destroyed, stranding you in a boiling wasteland. To be safe, you still place an outline of cobblestone around the portal’s frame. Nothing wrong with a little bit of insurance, right?
The oceanic stretch of lava at the edge of where you’ve entered this dimension continues to bubble, and it’s one of the only real threats to you. That, and the pieces of netherrack aflame scattered about. You extinguish one nearby just to be on the safe side as you travel out towards the lava. The magma stretches on and on for what seems like forever, with small islands (if you can call them that) of netherrack spread thin across the expanse of molten rock. You take one look back at the portal, hesitating to go further. This could be enough, the proof of this places existence. Your eyes still burn, your lungs are filled with smoke, and you’re almost certain if you were to return to the mercy of cool night air, your body would be hot to touch for hours to come.
It’s so quiet. There are no shrieks of ghasts, no packs of piglins, not a single blaze or wither skeleton in any fortress you could pray to find. It provides more statistical safety, sure, but… this place is more terrifying without the teeming promise of so many undead. Hues of reds and oranges surround you, and you look back up towards the bedrock ceiling, another patch of glowstone catching your eye. If you were stuck here, would you be content to die?
No, you shake your head, though there’s no one around to see it. The only voice to hear is your own, if you were to speak. The weight of your loneliness sinks into you, heavier than all the gold you could hope to haul back if things were different. If you hadn’t chosen to see what life was like in the supposed “peace” of it all. Without mobs, there were no objectives. Just biomes in a further desolated wasteland, nothing worth sticking around for without resources to obtain.
You realize you have been standing stagnant for sometime, having barely moved away from the portal. You don’t know where to go, what to do. If there is anywhere with going, anything worth doing in this new flavor of hell you’ve concocted on your own. You fear going to a bastion would further burn your lungs, what with all the ash floating in the air, weightless. It makes you miss the coolness of a breeze in your normal domain, the feeling of rain on your skin as you perused a forest, chopping down trees to expand your home. At least back home, there are villagers. Iron golems, the odd wandering trader. But here?
There is nothing. There is nothing. The quiet grows deafening as you still completely, the only truthful way to tell that things still move is the sound of fire burning netherrack nearby. Overwhelmed with the inability to decide where to go, what to do, if there was a meaning to adventure any longer, something new burns your eyes. Tears well up on your waterline, sizzle painfully on your cheeks as they boil into thin air with just how hot everything is. Your lungs burn further, wheezing and finally coughing up something of a small storm. Your journey into the coward’s way has left you feeling abysmally stranded, standing stupidly next to fire and lava, crying tears that only serve to burn you further. This sort of hell was unlike anything you could’ve expected, the abandonment of a Nether you once thought you knew, monsters and all.
You long for a ghast’s banshee-like shriek. You long to see an enderman roaming through, passing by. You yearn to see a hoglin charging at you, something to bring meaning to the idea of your death in such an empty place. You remember the fossils, then, remains of creatures no one has figured out. The proof that something used to be here, that something can still be found brings you no solace. There is no hope that your remains would be found, bones burned to ash within mere minutes of hitting lava. You wonder, if your skeleton were to remain after you rot in a fortress, would you have joined the others? Is that how they all ended up here? How they would have, if you’d’ve chosen to stick with the rules that you knew?
The amount of thinking you’ve done with the same lack of movement from before is impossibly more dizzying than standing in the portal, in the threshold between dimensions. The convenience of not having to defeat mobs before rest every day was nice, but unsettling. This was a whole new beast, the lack of threats that now surround you. The silence of the world, silence you ensured. You find you hate it more than you ever thought you could have.
It is not peaceful, the turmoil it creates within you, and you break your spell of inaction by marching swiftly towards the portal, bracing yourself for the nausea to wrack your stomach and vision alike. Even that is better than the crushing sensation of being entirely alone in a place that offers greatness at the risk of death, something you knew never to take for granted again.
It was strange, sickening, so surprising and so damn relieving to return through the portal, stumbling back out of it the way you came in. You look at the sky above you, seeing the moon is closer to setting than when you’d left, and you cry again at the sight of stars. The tears don’t boil on your skin, simply slip down your face into the grass. Your skin is still hot to touch, and you’re sure somewhere there is a burn mark to be discovered, but you’re home. You’re home.
You’d made it nowhere throughout that journey, a failure in comparison to your conquests in worlds past, portals upon portals becoming mere doors of transportation across thousands of blocks at a time. You had conquered the Nether in all its danger, its wonder, its heat.
Tonight, it conquered you. Ravaged your mind with the overwhelming silence of it all, the knowledge that you had been completely and totally alone, and the fact that it had been scarier than slipping off a bridge into a sea of lava. You may never again play with the idea of peace again, as there was nothing but fear to be found in the absence of the things you know. The things you know well.
You trudge back to your home, glance at the animals in the farm, left the same as when you first departed. That, at least, still manages to be a relief. You open the door to your base, neglecting to add anything to your chests as you brought nothing but a heavy conscience home.
Your fall to sleep is swift like most nights, but still haunted. You fear waking up in that wasteland again, only comforted by the knowledge that there, you cannot sleep. That is the last shred of peace you keep.