Most intimate to the player is the season of Spring - the world forms, often in a lush green, rarely overgrown or frozen or desiccated, resplendent and peaceful. Monsters form naturally as if from the Earth, sometimes literally, as nightfalls and the darkness of the caves below the grassy firmament rise upwards to attack the player. The Season of Wood, presided over by the Azure Dragon, the color of life, in freshly growing plants and jade, in creepers. The form of life opposite the player from this is the Testificate form, villagers and illagers making an immediately accessible conflict of species known. Their architecture is similar, above-ground overworld structures with social hierarchies implied in the construction, often made of wood and nearby materials. Agriculture grows as it does in the spring season of sowing, cut wood, sheep’s wool, bales of wheat, small gardens of vegetables forming the architectural foundation for their lives. They engage in war in a primitive way, one group living in peace and the other marching out in an innocent, savage way. They live as early civilizations never burdened with language, carrying mutely on the functions of organization like children at play.
The Vermilion Bird presides over fire, the stifling heat of summertime produced not by the fact of summer, but by passion - the heat and life of motion excited in the manner of aroused bodies, plants growing far outpace of their bounds, jungles abounding in even Northern climates for a brief window of months. The pig was once mistakenly made with its Y and Z values inverted, creating the mutation for the creeper. The pig provides the linkage into the Nether, a realm of timeless violence. Flesh of the pig, the lesser form of the human, takes on a humanoid form, where man uncovers savagery. The lava makes a haze like a bloody meridian, one has to descend, living off thrown gold and wild swings of the sword. All of it’s consensual, as where else does a lust for life lead one? Destruction occurs after-the-fact of great exertion of vitality, the empire expanding so fast and joyously entire continents are burned in ecstasy - Nero’s famous lyre being only an imperial ethos turned inwards. Destruction is a whirlwind of ecstasy as it spins out from the self and strikes everyone else, as the one inside is laughing. The nether and its inhabitants are in pain, but fire laughs. Fire is passion ignited, like sexual arousal or a lusting anger.
Autumn, the season of metal. When frost creeps in at the edges and borders of the explosive life of summertime and the world silences to prepare for the long season of winter. Death comes inevitably and bodies must return to the base matter, reduced to the leaden soil of Saturn in absolute darkness, in order to be the raw matter of the next season of rebirth. Not that this is much solace of course, as the creeping chill of autumn is nothing but terrifying and only leads to terminus for all suffering it. As the player digs and builds into the world, they uncover more and more ruins. The first proper structure added was the dungeon, a single room, made of mossed-over, long crumbled stone, with treasures and mindless flesh breeding inside it. After this, came the abandoned mineshafts and strongholds - more remnants, old buildings, long rotted and now populated only by death, metallic cutting edges and falling orange leaves, turning to brown and then soil on the ground. It’s said that the White Tiger only appears when absolute peace and virtue reigns over the land - after all, once the peak is reached, the only direction to go is down.
The Black Turtle rests at North, presiding over the darkness of water and winter. Look down from your boat, into the ocean, see the chthonic depths below. It turns to darkness quickly, as you sink, even more black than night, until the depths become so crushing... We imagine shadow to have the quality of water, as we go further into an abandoned building we “sink” and the darkness is supposed to envelop, swallow, consume us. None of this happens of course, but we can’t help but feel it. Maybe there is some memory, of the water the ocean is an eternal gradation downwards, like winter deepening colder and colder, layers of ice encasing, stilling, preservation at depths. The Guardians of the Ocean Monument make their primary goal to protect the Monument itself, to act as its namesake, still beneath the water. Mining is slow beneath water and the player is further impeded by being at risk of drowning while they cast a fatigue effect. Some question if the Guardians are alive at all, or if they’re some form of stone automaton, a life-form made akin to a golem of non-cellular matter. The ocean is a terminal point for those living in it, wide basins of existence distinct from the rest of the world beyond itself, a preserved world that slows until a deathly stillness. Towards the surface, ghosts rise and dolphins attempt to help the player scram from this kingdom of unlife.
Transcendence happens in stages. A few artefacts that we all know come into possession, the Totem of Unlife, the Heart of the Sea, etc - but what truly is the final prize of the game? Transcendence. Alchemy’s pursuit of the same in all places speaks to the same need, the one magic fulfills, to transcend the mundane limits. The Yellow Dragon of the Center, the one presiding over Earth, occupying the 0,0,0 position in the diagram of the five classical elements. A black dragon rests at the base of the game, activating the credit sequence, when The End is “freed”. This is only a pretender, after all, is the author anything but a function? Transcendence - maybe you taste it when the dragon bursts into 65 levels - the dragon sure thought it had done so, before you came along. Maybe you taste it in borderline creative mode Elytra flying, cheating death with a totem, breathing underwater. In these moments - and they are moments, never fully inhabited, but passing peaks of experiences - you become the author, the Yellow Dragon. But only ever a taste, a brief visit to the throne, before the revolution unseats you and you’re forced to once again claw down the gates and break into the palace in the endless cycle of struggle for those brief, timeless instants where you are the Earth, the center, the Emperor...
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