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.
The Desert Sea was every bit as enormous and confusing as it sounds. The sand was the deep orange of a sunset, and the dunes rolled in every direction, each one looking almost identical to the last. Within twenty minutes I had sand in my boots, sand in my pockets, sand in the acorn pocket on my tunic, and sand in places I didn’t fully understand. Biscuit had sand in her backpack but insisted it smelled like cinnamon, which meant there were diamonds somewhere nearby, which was useful information for a different day entirely.
We found the first shade crystal half-buried at the base of a sandstone ridge — a cool blue gem that hummed gently and dropped the temperature around us by a noticeable amount the moment I picked it up. It also glowed faintly, which I planted in the sand behind us like a breadcrumb marker, exactly like Biscuit’s plan said.
“Plan One is working,” I announced proudly.
Then the sand tornado arrived.
It wasn’t enormous, as sand tornadoes go. It was more the size of a large confused spinning cupboard. But it hit the Sunstone Map first, spinning it three full rotations before Biscuit snatched it back, and then it spun me around twice before depositing me facing completely the wrong direction.
“Southwest!” Biscuit called, pointing.
“I knew that!” I said, turning around.
We pressed on. The Sunstone Map showed a sandstone maze ahead — and it had appeared overnight, exactly like the quest notes Biscuit had read aloud three times suggested it would. Every wall looked identical. Every turn looked like every other turn. I walked into the same dead end twice before I noticed a small, grumpy figure in the distance moving one of the trail markers with enormous satisfaction.
Grumbleton the sand golem was about the height of my knee, built from rough sandstone blocks, with tiny glowing eyes and a permanent scowl that looked like it had been there since the beginning of time. He picked up a marker arrow, shuffled it forty-five degrees in the wrong direction, and then looked around proudly to see if anyone had noticed.
He noticed me noticing.
We stared at each other.
“Hello,” I said.
Grumbleton grumbled. It sounded like two boulders arguing.
I crouched down to his level. I’d talked to Endermites in the End dimension. I’d talked to a grumpy llama once for twenty minutes. I could do this. “I understand you like moving things,” I said carefully. “That seems very satisfying. But we really need those markers to point the right way. The Crystal Oasis is fading, and the villages need water.”
Grumbleton grumbled again, lower this time.
“Also,” I added, “you’d have much better things to move if the Oasis was restored. More plants. More interesting rocks.”
There was a long pause. Grumbleton looked at the marker. He looked at me. He shuffled it back to the correct direction with a sound like deeply reluctant agreement, then stomped away behind a dune, grumbling the entire time.
“Did you just negotiate with a sand golem?” Biscuit whispered.
“I prefer to call it a conversation,” I said.
Beyond the maze, the Desert Sea opened up into a wide basin, and there it was — the Crystal Oasis, shimmering at the far end like someone had scattered sea lanterns across a pond and surrounded them with rainbow-colored cacti that sparkled in every direction. The water was the clearest, most impossibly blue I’d ever seen. Even the air smelled different here: cool and fresh, like rain on warm stone.
And directly between us and the Oasis, rising from the sand in a series of stepped sandstone walls bristling with cactus traps, stood the pyramid fortress. Enormous. Prickly. Organized in a way that felt deliberately annoying.
Cactus-shaped footprints led straight to the front gate.
The Champion’s Crown buzzed warmly against my forehead. Not with alarm, exactly. More like recognition. There it is. There’s the next thing.
I collected the last shade crystal from beside a dead acacia tree and planted our final trail marker in the sand, making sure our path home glowed a steady blue all the way back through the maze. Biscuit was already pulling out her notebook.
“I have a new plan,” she said. “Actually I have five.”
“Which one involves music?” I asked, remembering what we’d learned about Captain Cactus on the road here.
Biscuit looked at me with an expression I can only describe as deeply impressed and slightly suspicious. “Plan Three,” she said quietly. “How did you know I had a Plan Three?”
“Lucky guess,” I said, grinning.
The pyramid waited. The Crown glowed. And somewhere inside all those sandstone walls, surrounded by stolen crafting ingredients and probably a very large collection of things that didn’t belong to him, Captain Cactus had absolutely no idea we were coming.
I adjusted my acorn pocket, checked that my boots were reasonably sand-free (they weren’t), and took one step forward.
Then I asked Biscuit to tell me Plan Three.
