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 —”
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.
“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 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 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.”
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?”
