I woke up that morning covered in purple potion stains, just like every other day. My name is Avery, and I’m the kid everyone calls “The Accidental Alchemist.” That’s a nice way of saying I mess up every single potion I try to make. My purple robe looked like a rainbow exploded on it from … Read more
I was crossing the village square, minding my own business, thinking very important thoughts about whether pigs preferred rain or sunshine (the answer, according to my friend Gerald the pig, is “neither, we prefer mud, Ollie, honestly”), when my left foot decided it had somewhere more interesting to be than underneath the rest of me. Down I went — arms spinning, blue tunic flapping — straight into the village fountain with a splash that soaked three chickens, one confused librarian, and a very startled flower pot.
“I meant to do that,” I announced to no one in particular, sitting in the fountain with water streaming down my messy brown hair.
I was too busy trying not to trip over a particularly sneaky root to answer her. I managed it. Barely. I considered this a personal victory and did a small celebratory hop, which is when I tripped over a completely different root. Some victories are complicated.
“Watch your feet,” Biscuit said helpfully, about three seconds too late, as she adjusted the enormous backpack bouncing on her shoulders. She had packed it that morning while reading from a list titled Things To Pack, which was itself on a list titled Lists I Need Today. I had counted at least four separate bags of crackers going in. Biscuit believes crackers can solve most problems. She might be right.
We’d left Sproutville before sunrise, still thinking about those scorch marks near the fountain square and the faint smell of redstone machinery Biscuit had detected. Somebody had taken every map in the village, and that somebody had left a very specific kind of mess — the hot, sharp-edged kind. But the Wool Festival couldn’t wait for us to figure that out. Rainbow Meadows needed help now.
I had managed to collect every last drop from the oak trees at the edge of Rainbow Meadows without tripping once, which was honestly some kind of personal record. I was feeling magnificent about this. I told a nearby rabbit about it, and she seemed impressed, though she may have just been waiting for me to move so she could eat the grass I was standing on.
“Ollie!” Biscuit’s voice came hissing through the tall grass to my left. “Did you get it? All of it? Tell me you got ALL of it!”
“Every drop,” I whispered back, holding up the little clay pot full of golden resin. It smelled faintly of oak bark and something warm, like summer. “How’s the distraction going?”
Biscuit poked her copper bowl-cut head through the grass. Her chunky yellow sweater had a grass stain on the mushroom sleeve, which meant things had been at least slightly chaotic. “Baron Blaze has been telling me his entire life story for the last twelve minutes,” she said. “Did you know he once reorganized all the Nether fortresses by SIZE? He made a CHART. He showed me the chart, Ollie. It was laminated.”
I pressed my lips together so I wouldn’t laugh. “He laminated it?”
“With GOLD trim.” She grabbed my arm. “Come on. He’ll finish the story eventually and then he’ll notice you’re gone and then—”
A sound like a small thunderstorm wearing a very fancy hat rolled across the meadow.
“WHERE,” boomed Baron Blaze, “IS THE SHORT ONE WITH THE RIDICULOUS HAIR?”
Usually, morning looks like morning — all oranges and pinks smeared across the sky like someone had knocked over their paint pots. But when I crawled out of our little campsite at the edge of Rainbow Meadows, the sky was just… gray. Flat, dull, boring gray. Like someone had taken the whole sunrise and replaced it with a very large piece of cardboard.
I blinked. I looked left. I looked right. I looked up again, just in case I’d missed something.
Nope. Still cardboard.
“Biscuit,” I said. “The sky is broken.”
Biscuit was already sitting up in her bedroll, her copper bowl-cut hair perfectly neat on one side and completely sideways on the other, which was unusual for her. She was staring upward with an expression I recognized — the one where her nose twitched like a rabbit’s before a big sneeze.
“It’s not broken,” she said slowly. “It smells like old socks. And also…” She sniffed again, more deliberately. “Sadness. Coming from the north.”
I had learned, since our adventures in Rainbow Meadows and everything with Baron Blaze’s ridiculous cape, to take Biscuit’s nose very seriously indeed. If Biscuit said something smelled like old socks and sadness, something was definitely, horribly wrong.
One moment Biscuit and I were walking along the northern path toward Blockville, the morning sun trying its absolute best to push through the gray sky above us. The next moment — whomp — we were inside a cloud that had apparently decided to live on the ground instead of up where clouds belong. I could barely see my own hand in front of my face, which was a problem because my hand was holding a very important map.
“Biscuit,” I said carefully. “The map is wet.”
“The map is dissolving, Ollie.”
“That’s what I said.”
She made the noise she makes when she’s trying very hard not to say something. I’ve heard it a lot since Sproutville.
“Ollie,” Biscuit whispered from somewhere to my left. “You can stop being a boulder. The guards went around the other side.”
I unraveled the Wool of Wonders from around my shoulders and became myself again, which was honestly a relief. Being a boulder is surprisingly uncomfortable. I’d managed the correct block type about forty percent of the time yesterday, which was a personal record, and I was quite proud of it.
“Right,” I said, brushing fog off my patched-up blue tunic. “New plan. We need to get into Wanda’s maze, find the hats, and get back to Blockville before the Grand Hat Festival is ruined forever. We have two days. What have you got?”
Biscuit unzipped her enormous brown backpack, which made the sound of approximately forty-seven snacks shifting around inside. She pulled out a list. Then another list. Then a list of the other lists.
“Seven plans,” she announced proudly, “ranked by how likely they are to involve us falling into something.”
“Which one has the lowest falling risk?”
She looked at all seven lists very carefully. “None of them, actually.”
Biscuit leaned over and whispered, “Do you actually have a plan?”
“About forty percent of one,” I whispered back. She nodded like that was completely acceptable, which honestly made me feel great.
The fog maze was behind us now. We’d found our way out by following the smell Biscuit had been tracking — something she described as “burnt toffee mixed with gray crayon and a very sad Tuesday” — which turned out to be the base of Sky Tower, a tall, crooked structure of dark stone that floated just above the treeline like it had forgotten to come back down. A rickety staircase spiraled up its outside, and at the very top, through the haze, I could just barely see the glow of hundreds of glass jars.
Stolen sunrises. Stolen auroras. All of them trapped up there while the rest of us lived under a flat gray sky that smelled, according to Biscuit, of old socks and sadness.
I spotted them the moment I crawled out of our little overnight shelter near the base of Sky Tower — still rubbing my eyes, still half-dreaming about glass jars full of sunrises. They glittered on the ground like someone had walked through a pile of crushed amethyst and then wandered off toward the eastern ridge without bothering to apologize. Each footprint was perfectly shaped, perfectly spaced, and heading in a perfectly straight line. Which already made me suspicious, because nothing in my life had ever been perfectly anything.
“Biscuit,” I said. “Come look at this.”
Biscuit emerged from the shelter with her backpack already on and a cereal bar already half-eaten, because Biscuit had probably been awake for an hour making lists. She took one look at the footprints, crouched down, and sniffed.
“Purple chalk dust,” she said immediately. “And something else.” She sniffed again. “Endstone. Definitely endstone. Which smells exactly like cold metal and slightly disappointed dreams.”
I had no idea what disappointed dreams smelled like, but I trusted Biscuit’s nose the way I trusted my own two feet — completely, even when they led me somewhere unexpected. Usually into a hole.
