Part I: Sunflower

I awoke to see a sunflower towering above me.

A sunflower? I hadn't seen a sunflower in years . . . I'd used them all to stop the corruption from spreading – before the Dryad and her purification powder appeared and made life much easier for me.

It occurred to me that unless the sunflower was magnificently tall, I was on the ground. I had fallen asleep on a patch of grass. In front of a sunflower.

So had the sunflower grown overnight?

No.

So where had it come from? Realisation started seeping into my thick skull.

Or where was I?

In an attempt to move I realised that my entire body was aching. Not in pain, but as if I had been mining for days on end.

I almost wished that I had been.

Those long days and nights I would spend hammering away at the stone walls of a cavern, trying to find ore or gemstones . . .

But those days were over.

It had been months since I had gone underground.

There was nothing left to find.

Forcing my mind away from my melancholy, I sat upright and let out a groan of pain as I did so. I blink, trying to bring the world into focus, and see a figure laying in the grass a few metres away from me. The figure let out a gasp of pain and sits up, revealing a wild shock of brown hair and an achingly familiar face.

"Guide?" I mumbled, trying to make sense out of this situation. "What are you doing here?"

"Where exactly is here?" he mumbled back in a rare display of ignorance. We look at our surroundings and raised our eyebrows simultaneously.

We had never been there before.

I had never been there before.

Which didn't make sense.

I've been everywhere in Terraria.

There was nowhere left to explore.

Hence the last two years.

We're in a valley of some sort, surrounded by high hills the size of mountains.

I've scaled mountains before.

But even on my standards, those mountains were HIGH.

Almost too high.

Nothing had ever been too high before. Those couldn't be.

We were also surrounded by trees. Not enough to obscure the view of our surrounds, but still a great deal of them.

My mind immediately turned from the trees to my axe, and I let out a gasp of shock.

"Where's my axe?!" I cried suddenly, panicking. I haven't let my axe, pickaxe, sword or any other important items out of my sight ever since I forged them, even after I stopped needing them. But, for the first time, the familiar weight of my weapons on my back and around my waist was gone. "Guide! Where's my axe?!"

"It's alright! Stop panicking!" he said, walking towards me. "It's not here, but you can always make another one."

"Out of what?!" I cried back, on the verge of tears. "I need an axe to chop down trees! How am I supposed to make an axe without one?!"

"Just calm down," the Guide replied calmly to my outburst. "It'll be alright. What do you have in your pouch?"

Fighting down my murderous instincts, I reached into the seemingly small pouch that held all of my things in it, and found it almost empty.

There was nothing in it. Nothing.

Things that I needed to survive had disappeared.

I reached deeper into the pouch until my entire arm was feeling around in it, hoping to find something.

And I did.

I drew it out of the pouch and found that I had two things that I didn't need back then.

A healing potion. And an acorn.

"Great!" I cried, holding the bottle so tensely that it almost broke. "No boomerang, no sword, no protection, no building materials, just a potion! And an acorn! In a forest!"

"Better than nothing," the Guide said with a smile. "Be optimistic. You're such a pessimist, Zelda68."

"And who can blame me?" I shouted, hoping to wipe the smile off his face and make him see reality for once. "We're stuck here! No food, no water, no weapons, no shelter, no pickaxe, surrounded by trees we can't even cut down!"

His grin turned into the smirk that I hated so much and he crossed his arms.

"Wrong! We are not stuck here. Even the tallest of mountains can be climbed; you're the one who taught me that. We can make a shelter. Trees drop branches, remember? No need to be so destructive! Just walk around and pick them up. And there's bound to be a stream here somewhere, or how do you explain Mr Fluffy over there?" he remarked, indicating towards a rabbit running through the trees.

"But rabbits eat grass," I pointed out, slightly calmer. "We still don't have any food, and the human body can only last on water for six weeks, you're the one who told me that."

"We can find food. There might be fish in the stream or river or whatever it is."

"And if there isn't?"

". . . Then, I admit, we may have to resort to mushroom soup."

"No!" I cried. For my first six months in Terraria, I had eaten nothing but mushroom soup. After that, I swore never to do it again. "Not mushroom soup! Anything but mushroom soup!"

"Why do you hate it so much?" he asked with a frown. "It's not that bad."

"Guide," I replied, my face stony, "I have eaten raw zombie to avoid it. Don't tell me after that I have to eat it now."

"Raw zombie?" he asked, looking disgusted. "You mean human flesh? Dead human flesh?"

"I had to. I was stuck in the jungle caverns."

"And you had mushrooms with you at the time?"

"Well, no, but the thought that it wasn't mushroom soup kept me eating it." I explained.

The Guide looked like he was going to be sick, but I ignored him and started walking away. "If this stream of yours actually exists, I'm going to find it. You look for branches."

I heard him mumble something about how women are supposed to be the fairer sex but for once he didn't end up at the tip of my sword for it. I didn't have a sword. But I did slap him.

"That womanly enough for you?" I asked. "Better than a punch?" I cut him off before he can interrupt with one of his usual cocky remarks. "I didn't save Terraria from the corruption by being womanly, remember?"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it!" He called after me as I started walking away. "But hey, you should be happy! You've wanted somewhere new to explore for the last two years!"

I stopped in my tracks and realised that he was right. I have a whole new land to explore, but this time I haven't been thrown into the deep end. This time I'm an experienced miner and swordsman, and I'm already the Hero of Terraria.

This is a chance to start again.

I sighed.

But the Guide had to come along too, didn't he?