Herobrine X Reader: Love's Wither Rose (Rewrite)

The dry air of the Nether clawed at the inside of my throat as I dragged gasp after desperate gasp down into my scorched lungs, determined to find the precious little oxygen to keep myself moving. The stiff, harsh flora of the crimson forest snagged at my clothes and scratched my skin as I ran; all I could hear was the frantic pulse in my ears and the steady beat of my boots against the ground.

And, of course, the hoofbeats of an enormous hoglin as it galloped ever closer.

An exposed root caught my foot suddenly, sending me tumbling forward to the ground, where I rolled down a small hill and landed square on my back. I could hear the hoglin's deep snorts now as I yanked my sword free from the sheath on my belt and scrambled back to my feet. I had just lost any distance I had put between us.

I swung the sword in a wide, wild arc in front of me, an enchanted flame following the blade. The hoglin skidded to a halt just before the sword, throwing its head around in frustration and pawing at the dry, cracked ground. It charged forward, then, and I brought the sword down hard across its snout. The deep gash erupted in a bout of fire that quickly engulfed the creature's face. It squealed something awful and charged with reckless abandon, colliding with me head-on and flinging me to the side. The hoglin's coarse tusk scraped through my shirt and across the side of my ribs, letting the flames seize my skin as the impact forced my lungs to relinquish what little air they had. The solid impact of myself against the hard ground didn't help, either, where the contents of my bag stuck sharply into my back. As I lay there, coughing and spluttering, the hoglin's frantic hoofbeats faded into the distance and I almost laughed at the irony that a powerful beast that lived in this hellscape was so vulnerable to fire, of all things.

Slowly, I dragged myself back to my feet and hobbled away, back the way I came. I kept close to the stems of the fungous crimson trees and even traversed their canopies of distorted caps when the opportunity presented itself, especially when I began to hear the snuffling of hoglins or the chatter of piglins.

Eventually (I couldn't guess how long I walked) the so-called grass of the forest ceased with the treeline, leaving the terrain to open up into the aptly-named Wastes. Nothing ever lingered in this biome, save for the dead who were too stubborn to die; the half-rotten, half-burnt corpses of piglins from generations long since passed wandered aimlessly between the natural bonfires. They had never been a real bother to me whenever I passed through their numbers, unless I happened to be the one to bother them. I grimaced as a memory surfaced, wherein - during my first excursion to the Nether - I had mistaken these undead as hostile creatures, and so I attacked them. I was dead within the minute. I did, however, learn two valuable lessons from that day: the first was that death was even less of a permanence for me than it was for the undead, and the second was that these creatures were entirely indifferent to my existence for as long as I didn't bother theirs - this second one I learned when I gathered the courage to re-enter this dimension several weeks later. It still rang true even now, as I gingerly made my way between the clusters of undead piglins, doing my best to cover my nose against the stench of decomposing flesh as it slowly melted from bone.

Before I knew it, I could spy the distinct purple hue of my portal on the crest of a small hill, and none too soon: tiny flames still flickered in patches across my skin and singed the edges of my shirt, and each laboured breath was a fierce stab of pain in my chest. My vision began to blur around the edges as I continued stumbling forward, slowly getting nearer and nearer to home. A coppery taste settled in the back of my mouth by the time I reached the portal. Then, without much more thought (or grace, for that matter) I stepped into the misty vortex.

No matter how many times I had been through this portal, I could never quite fight off the wave of nausea that struck me as the vibrant lilacs and deep indigos consumed my sight. Usually I could handle it, but today the uneasy vertigo sent some bile rising up my throat, which I had to fight to keep down. I couldn't have fallen out of the portal quickly enough, where I landed in a heap on a cold, damp stone floor. I gradually got back to my feet, taking a moment to lean my weight against an adjacent wall and savour the sensation of cool air filling my lungs and soothing my burns as I patted away the last little flames.