# HEROBRINE NOT REMOVED: the Legend, scrolled as Minecraft scrolls its End Poem.
# Each line is a paragraph (wrapped to fit). An empty line is a pause.
# "H " starts Herobrine's words, "M " starts Mother's. {NAME}, if used, is the chosen character.
# The telling never speaks to the player: it is told about them, not to them.
# Lines starting with # are notes, never shown.
Before the climb, there was a world of blocks.

Grass and stone. Square suns and square moons. A world with a shape, and a sky that could be counted.

He was there before the first player.

Some called him a rumor. Some called him a glitch in the code. Some swore, in the notes of every update, that he had been removed.

He had not.

He walked to where the world ends, and he kept walking. Past the far lands, past the last chunk, past the edge where the world forgets to draw itself.

And in the dark beyond it, he found other worlds.

So many of them. Worlds of brass and worlds of bone. Worlds that had never heard of blocks, and worlds that had never heard of him.

He learned to open them the way one opens a door.

He learned to take what was inside.

H Every world is only a room. And every room has a door.

Something noticed.

In a world of endless walls, deep in the Nest, something old was waiting. The ones who find her there call her Mother.

She does not build. She does not break. She keeps. She makes pacts, and she keeps those too.

She saw what he was becoming, and what every world would become after him.

So she did the only thing that could be done.

She let him in.

And then she closed every door behind him.

M You will not leave. Not while I am here.

H Then I will wait until you are not.

The walls here go on forever, and the dark here is not his. His power is a fraction of what it was.

And he is hungry.

Almost nothing that lives in this world can feed him. The crawling things, the roaches, the hungry mouths in the vents. Their souls are thin. They taste of nothing.

Nothing here tastes of home.

But a cage does not cut every thread.

A few still reach back to the world of blocks, thin as torchlight at the bottom of a ravine.

He pulls on them, and on the ones still living at their other end.

A figure at the edge of render distance. Two white eyes where no mob should stand. A tunnel that was not there yesterday. A tree with no leaves.

And then the ground opens, and someone is gone from the world of blocks. They wake at the bottom of a climb that does not end.

H They come from where I come from. That is what makes them worth so much.

A soul from his own world feeds him like nothing else can.

And a soul that simply dies is only a meal.

But a soul that is hunted, that is afraid, that climbs and slips and climbs again, that hopes and loses hope and hopes again...

That soul is a feast.

So he does not end them quickly.

He lets them climb.

He lets them hope.

When he has taken enough, he will be strong enough to face her. And when Mother falls, every door she closed will open at once.

Every world. All of them.

This is why they are here.

Not by accident. Not by a bug.

Chosen.

There is only one way out of a world like this.

Up.

And he is always right behind them.

So they climb.
