He smiled.
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.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay, okay, okay.”
“That’s seven okays,” Biscuit said. “You only say seven okays when things are genuinely bad.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s mostly fine. Forty-two minutes is — “
“Not enough time to swim through the void to five separate islands, Ollie.”
“Right. Yes. That would be the problem.” I looked at the five islands. Each one was maybe thirty blocks away, floating in the dark like lost puzzle pieces. Too far to jump. Too far to bridge quickly, especially without our materials. Which were currently being sat on by Endermites.
That’s when a thought lit up in my brain like a redstone torch.
Back in Sproutville, I’d always been able to talk to animals. Pigs, wolves, that one extremely opinionated llama who lived behind the library. In the fog maze, even the sounds of creatures had responded to me somehow. But these were Endermites. End dimension creatures. I had absolutely no idea if my gift stretched this far.
There was only one way to find out.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and made a sound. I’m not entirely sure how to describe it. Somewhere between a hum and a question and a feeling of I-mean-no-harm. It was the same sound I’d made once to calm Snatcher the rogue sheep back at Rainbow Meadows, except lower, and with slightly more apologetic energy.
The nearest island went very quiet.
Then, one Endermite turned around.
It was small, even for an Endermite, with a faint shimmer along its back like a purple soap bubble. It looked at me. I looked at it. Biscuit held her breath so hard I could hear it.
“Hello,” I said, carefully. “I know you’re very busy. And I know the Earl told you to scatter everything. But those blocks are really, really important. There’s a whole contest. Colors. Rainbows. If Lord Grimblock wins, everything goes gray forever.” I paused. “You live in the End dimension. Which is already pretty gray. Wouldn’t you like there to be more colors in the world? Just — generally? As a concept?”
The Endermite made a sound. A tiny, buzzing, almost-musical sound.
And then it put down its bundle of rainbow wool.
It wasn’t perfect. The Endermites didn’t exactly queue up and hand everything back politely. About a third of them ignored me completely. One of them sat on a sea lantern and refused to move for four whole minutes. But enough of them listened — buzzing and chittering in that strange musical way — that we had a real chance.
That’s where Biscuit came in.
She pulled Nugget’s Golden Feather out of her backpack, held it above her head, and looked at it with the expression she usually reserves for her most complicated lists.
“Nugget,” she said firmly, to the feather, “I need you to cluck. Right now. Please. I am asking nicely, which I want noted.”
From somewhere inside the feather — and I will never fully understand how this worked — there came a small, confident cluck.
Biscuit rose off the ground like a very determined balloon.
“Oh!” she said, genuinely surprised, even though this had technically been the plan. “Oh, this is BRILLIANT. I’m going to the second island first — it has the most amethyst — then the third — “
“Biscuit!”
“Right, yes, going!” She floated across the void, yellow sweater bright against the dark purple sky, stuffing materials into her enormous backpack as she drifted from island to island. Every time she started to drop, Nugget clucked again from inside the feather, and up she went.
I kept talking to the Endermites. My voice went a bit hoarse. One of them climbed onto my boot and stayed there for the entire process, which I chose to interpret as friendly.
With six minutes to spare, Biscuit landed back beside me with a thump, backpack bulging, hair slightly sideways, cheeks red with excitement. She opened the flap to show me: rainbow wool, sea lanterns, amethyst blocks, all of it packed in with the precision of someone who also keeps lists of her lists.
“Got everything,” she announced. “Well. Ninety-four percent of everything. One amethyst block is currently being used as a chair by a very stubborn Endermite and I decided to leave it.”
“Wise,” I said.
We looked at each other. We looked at the packed backpack. We looked at the endstone door where the Ender Earl had very definitely locked himself inside with seventeen satisfying clicks.
From behind the door, faintly, came the sound of someone absolutely not peeking through the keyhole.
“Right,” I said, grinning my gap-toothed grin. “Elegance Duel. Let’s go build something beautiful.”
