“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.
The Ender Earl was already waiting for us, seated on a throne that appeared to be made of stacked purpur pillars with a velvet cushion on top. His sparkly purple cape was draped just so. His blocky crown sat perfectly straight. His violet glasses caught the pale light and glowed. He had his golden clipboard out and was writing something on it with great importance.
“You’re late,” he said, without looking up.
“We got lost,” I said. “Someone swapped all the signs.”
He looked up. “Yes,” he said. “That was me. I have it in writing.” He tapped the clipboard.
Not a warm, friendly smile. The kind of smile that means someone has already read the last page of the book and knows exactly how it ends. He tucked his golden clipboard under one arm, pushed his glowing violet glasses up his pale lavender nose, and called out in a voice like someone announcing a very important weather event.
“Endermites! SCATTER PROTOCOL SEVEN!”
For exactly one second, nothing happened. Then the courtyard exploded with tiny purple shapes.
They poured out of cracks in the endstone walls, out from under purpur pillars, out of gaps I was absolutely certain hadn’t existed a moment ago. Hundreds of them — no, thousands — each one the size of a bread roll and twice as wiggly. And every single one of them was carrying something. A bundle of rainbow wool here. A glowing sea lantern there. Chunks of amethyst tucked under what I can only describe as their front bits.
“The blocks!” Biscuit gasped, grabbing my sleeve. “Ollie, they’ve got ALL the blocks!”
She was right. In roughly eleven seconds, every material we needed for the Elegance Duel — the same materials the Ender Earl had smugly offered as the riddle prize — vanished into a purple, wriggling tide. The Endermites scattered in every direction, teleporting in little bursts of violet light, and when the last one blinked away, I could see five small dark islands floating in the void around the courtyard, each one lit up faintly with the glow of scattered materials.
The Ender Earl straightened his purpur crown with one finger and made a small tick on his clipboard.
“This dimension is MINE,” he announced, “and I have it in writing. You had your riddle contest. You have — ” he checked his clipboard, ” — approximately forty-two minutes before sunrise disqualifies you from the Elegance Duel entirely. Good luck navigating five islands with no map. Toodle-oo.”
Then he walked inside, shut the endstone door, and I heard the very precise sound of seventeen locks clicking into place.
I mean, yes, I had also fallen off three of them, and Biscuit had nearly frozen solid trying to choose between two equally fast routes back to the main platform, and at one point I accidentally communicated something to a group of Endermites that made them carry the sea lanterns away from me before I corrected whatever I’d said. But we had all the materials. Every single one. Rainbow wool, sea lanterns, and amethyst blocks, all crammed into Biscuit’s truly miraculous backpack.
“Forty-two minutes when we started,” Biscuit announced, consulting the little hourglass she’d pulled from her bag, “which means we now have eleven minutes and — oh no.”
“Eleven minutes is great!” I said, only partially believing it.
The Elegance Duel platform was enormous — a flat stretch of endstone as wide as Sproutville’s entire square, glowing faintly purple in the dim End sky. Two building zones were marked out with thin lines of amethyst dust: one on the left, one on the right. The Ender Earl was already in his zone, working in absolute silence. His structure was breathtaking. A symmetrical tower of purpur blocks, each one perfectly aligned, rising in neat identical tiers. Sea lanterns placed at exact intervals. Everything level. Everything square.
It was the most organized thing I had ever seen. I hated it a little bit.
I stepped into my zone, set all the materials in a careful pile, and immediately tripped over the pile.
I was halfway through a piece of toast — honestly the best piece of toast I’d made in weeks, perfectly golden, not even slightly on fire — when the Crown buzzed against my head like a very small, very insistent bee. It had been doing that more since the Ender Earl’s tournament, pulsing with this warm amber light that reminded me of three candles on a birthday cake. Three villains down. Two to go before it reached full legend glow.
“It’s pointing southwest,” Biscuit said without looking up from her notebook. She had seven lists open simultaneously, which I know because she’d numbered them. “Specifically toward the Desert Sea. Specifically urgently.”
“How do you know it’s urgent?”
“It’s buzzing.” She finally looked up. “Also your hair is standing up even more than usual, and that only happens when something important is about to occur.”
I touched my head. She wasn’t wrong.
We packed up camp quickly. Biscuit had the Sunstone Map spread on a flat boulder, and even I could see the problem — the golden lines that traced the path across the Desert Sea were going faint at the edges, like ink left out in the rain. The Crystal Oasis glimmered at the map’s center, still bright, but the route to reach it was disappearing one sand dune at a time.
“How long do we have?” I asked.
Biscuit sniffed the map. “Smells like warm sandstone and something slightly panicked,” she said. “Maybe half a day before the path markings fade completely.”
I picked up my pack. Then I looked at Biscuit. Then — and this was the part that would have surprised the old me, the Chapter One me who fell into fountains and charged forward without a single thought in my head — I said, “What’s the plan?”
Biscuit stared at me for a full three seconds. Her mouth did something complicated.
“Did you just ask me for a plan before running toward something?”
“I might have.”
“Before falling into anything?”
“Nothing has come up to fall into yet.”
She pressed her lips together very firmly, but I could see her trying not to look absolutely delighted. She cleared her throat. “Right. Yes. I have four plans. Plan One involves the shade crystals shown on the map — we collect them along the route to stay cool and also to mark our path as we go. Plan Two involves—”
“Plan One sounds excellent,” I said. “Let’s do Plan One.”
Biscuit wrote Ollie asked for plan. Personal triumph. Note for records in her notebook and snapped it shut.
One second I was walking beside Biscuit, checking the Sunstone Map while she sniffed the air and muttered something about shade crystals smelling like cold lemonade. The next second, a wall of spinning orange sand appeared from absolutely nowhere and swallowed us whole.
I tumbled sideways. Then backward. Then sideways again, which I was pretty sure wasn’t physically possible, but the desert didn’t seem to care about physics. The tornado spun me around three times, made a sound like a very large sneeze, and then dropped me face-first into a sand dune that was unfortunately not soft at all.
“I meant to do that,” I said automatically, into the sand.
The dune did not respond.
I sat up and looked around. The sky was pale yellow and blazing hot. The Champion’s Crown — still glowing with its three villain-victories worth of warm light — had somehow ended up on backwards during the spin. I fixed it. Three separate dunes stretched in three separate directions, and Biscuit was absolutely nowhere.
“BISCUIT!”
Silence. Then, very faintly, from somewhere behind the tallest dune: “I’M FINE. I HAVE PLANS. SEVERAL PLANS. HOW MANY DO YOU NEED?”
We’d slipped through a crack in the fortress wall about six minutes ago, which was honestly a miracle considering I’d already tripped over two of my own footsteps and nearly sat on a cactus trap. The fortress interior was enormous — a cavernous sandstone pyramid filled with towering shelves carved directly into the walls, every single shelf packed with stolen goods. Diamonds sorted by size. Wool organized by colour. Iron ingots stacked in perfect pyramids. It would have been impressive if it wasn’t so deeply, completely wrong.
“The vault has to be deeper in,” Biscuit murmured, consulting the list she’d started writing the moment we entered. It was already three pages long. “The shade crystals we collected should help mask our heat signatures from the Sand Minions, but we need more time. Significantly more time.” She looked at me in a way that meant she had seventeen plans but none of them were quite right yet.
I stood at the entrance to the main vault, the Champion’s Crown warm on my head, and took the deepest breath I’d ever taken in my entire life. Three victories were glowing inside that crown already — Baron Blaze, Wither Wanda, the Ender Earl — and each one had taught me something. But this felt different. Because Captain Cactus wasn’t angry the way the others had been angry. He was sad the way that comes out sideways and ends up looking like stolen crafting supplies and misplaced sandstone slabs.
“Ready?” Biscuit whispered beside me. She had her backpack clasped shut, her lucky button right on top where she could reach it. She’d been carrying that button since Chapter Five without ever once using it sensibly, but tonight I noticed her fingers weren’t even hovering over it nervously. She looked calm. Decided.
I nodded. “I have a plan,” I said.
Biscuit’s jaw dropped so far it nearly hit the sandstone floor. “You have — I’m writing this down —”
