“Ollie,” she said, clutching the straps of her enormous backpack as the path beneath our feet shuddered again, “I want to be extremely clear that this is not one of your accidents.”
“I KNOW,” I said, very relieved. “I haven’t even tripped yet today.”
“It’s nine in the morning.”
“It’s a personal record.”
The Rumbling Ridges stretched out ahead of us — a wide, rocky landscape striped with deep orange cracks where warm light pulsed up from somewhere far, far below. The rocks were dark and jagged like giant broken teeth, and little wisps of steam shot upward without warning, making the whole place look like a pot of soup coming to a boil. A very large, very dangerous pot of soup. The Champion’s Crown on my head buzzed with a warm, steady hum — the kind it had made right before we’d found Captain Cactus’s fortress, and before we’d walked into the Ender Earl’s courtyard, and before about seventeen other moments I’d rather not think about too hard.
Four villains down. The crown glowed brighter than I’d ever seen it.
I could feel the rumbles through the soles of my boots as Biscuit and I sprinted across the Rumbling Ridges, the volcanic rock cracking and hissing beneath us like the whole landscape was annoyed we’d shown up. Which, honestly, was fair. We had shown up uninvited. Again.
“Four vents sealed!” Biscuit announced, checking her list at a full run, which is an impressive skill that I have never once managed. “Three remaining — northeast, northwest, and the big one at the ridge peak. Fizzwick has been at vent two, but I re-capped it while you were talking to that magma sprite about his feelings.”
“He had a lot of feelings,” I said, slightly out of breath. “Very valid ones, actually.”
The Champion’s Crown buzzed against my forehead, warmer than usual. Four villains down, and its glow had been getting steadily brighter since the Ender Earl — but right now it was doing something new. It was pulsing, like a heartbeat that had just had a very alarming piece of news.
I didn’t get to think about that for long, because we rounded a boulder and nearly ran face-first into an army of Magma Cubes.
There were dozens of them. Big ones, medium ones, and a frankly concerning number of tiny ones bouncing along in a line like a very dangerous conga. They filled the entire path between us and the northeast vent, jiggling and glowing and blocking the way completely.
“Right,” I said. “Wool of Wonders. Magma block disguise. I’ve got this.”
Biscuit’s eyebrows went up. “You’ve successfully become the correct block roughly forty percent of the time.”
“That’s a much higher percentage than when we started,” I pointed out, and I pulled the Wool of Wonders from my pocket before she could argue.
The warm, shimmery fabric rippled over me. I felt the familiar tingle, held my breath, and thought very specifically: magma block, magma block, please be a magma block and not a hay bale or a dirt block or that one time I became a bookshelf—
I looked down at my hands.
Glowing orange. Cracked and warm. Magma block.
I actually gasped out loud. Biscuit made a noise that sounded like a proud sniff combined with shock combined with someone trying very hard not to cheer.
“Don’t say anything,” I told her. “I’ll lose it.”
I walked straight into the Magma Cube army. They bounced around me, completely unbothered. One of the bigger ones bumped into me, squinted with its tiny cube eyes, and then bounced away. I gave Biscuit a thumbs up from inside the disguise, which probably looked extremely strange, but she understood.
She darted around the outer edge of the army while they were focused on not-noticing me, and we met on the other side, both slightly out of breath and grinning enormously.
“You were a perfect magma block,” Biscuit said.
I nearly tripped over a pebble from pure happiness. “I know.“
Because standing between us and the final sealed vent — the seventh one, the big one, the one Fizzwick had been guarding like it was his personal birthday present — was the entrance to Magma Queen Mira’s underground lava palace. And from somewhere deep inside it came a sound like thunder mixed with someone who was absolutely certain they were right about everything.
“She knows we’re here,” Biscuit said, sniffing the air carefully. “She smells like volcanic rock and extremely strong opinions.”
Then I tripped over a loose magma block and fell face-first into a pile of rainbow wool.
“I meant to do that,” I said into the wool.
“You always do,” said Biscuit, and I could hear the smile in her voice even with my face buried in approximately forty stolen wool blocks.
I pushed myself upright and looked around. The palace was extraordinary, even now — enormous vaulted ceilings of dark stone, lava falls running down carved channels along the walls, and every kind of glittering block imaginable stacked in careful towers: amethyst clusters from the End, festival banners from Blockville, rainbow wool from Rainbow Meadows, sea lanterns from places I couldn’t even name. Mira had collected it all, every beautiful thing, and brought it here where nobody could see it.
That was the part that always made my chest feel a little twisty.
