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?”
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.
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.
