The End: An Official Minecraft Novel

by Catherynne M. Valente

The Overworld.

  Ugh, why? There’s humans there.

  Humans were the worst thing he knew about. Worse than the void you could so easily fall into. Worse than grown-up endermen. Worse than thieves after your loot. Way worse than Grumpo. Humans hated endermen. They killed endermen and stole their hearts. The ender pearls that every enderman was born with, the jewels that gave them the power to teleport. Who did that? Who stole hearts?

  I dunno. Mo stretched her long, dark legs. Meet new people. Destroy them. Get more loot. Something to eat that’s not chorus fruit. Serve the Great Chaos.

  Mo, you know what happened to our hubunits. They went into the Overworld and never came back. If not for the Overworld, we would still have an End.

  They got caught in the rain, Mo remembered. A horrible memory. Rain was poison to their people. Standing in a summer storm was like standing beneath a million silver bullets.

  It could happen to anyone. That’s what the Great Chaos teaches. It gives and it takes. It could happen to you or me or Grumpo. It could happen to Lopp’s enderfrags. She stands there waiting for them every day. Have you ever seen Lopp’s fragments?

  No, Mo thought softly.

  Fin flicked a chorus fruit over the edge of the pillar. It floated down to the yellow earth. There you go. It does happen to anyone. How many endermen do we lose every week?

  May their noble sacrifice hasten the Reign of the Great Chaos, Mo thought piously.

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But guess who does the Forces of Order’s dirty work? Humans. All our problems are because of humans. It’s because of humans we can’t even remember what our hubunits look like. It’s because of humans we can’t just pop up to the Overworld for a nice picnic whenever we feel like it. It’s not worth it, anyway. I promise. Nothing up there is better than what we have here. The only good reason to visit the Overworld is to serve the Great Chaos. And I wouldn’t even do that unless I was sick of being alive. What could be more Chaotic than refusing to serve anybody, after all?

  Fin followed the purple spores floating around his skin with his eyes. That was how you could tell an enderman was talking, even if you couldn’t hear it. The little glittering violet lights of their telepathy at work flittered all around them.

  Is that what our hubunits were doing? Serving? Sacrificing?

  I think so. I like to think so. That would mean us being orphans was something more than just a stupid, mean joke the Great Chaos played on us for fun.

  Vengeance? Mo thought casually. We could hunt down humans all night long. It might be fun. Steal their hearts for a change.

  Mo, the Overworld is dangerous. It takes people away. Why risk it?

  I guess you’re right. Besides, we have everything we need right here. She squeezed his dark, thin hand.

  The lantern light sparkled everywhere. It was the most beautiful night the twins could imagine. Just like every night. Fin put his long, angular black arm around his twin and rubbed her square head affectionately.

  Oh! she thought. It’s coming close this time!

  The ender dragon soared toward them, catching the light from each lantern it passed.

  Good afternoon, ED. Mo waved shyly as the creature swooped down toward their pillar. They often tried to talk to it, though it was not tame. It rarely spoke back.

  But today, something different happened.

  The ender dragon turned its boxy black head toward them. It opened its great mouth. Its insides glowed violet.

  Hail to thee and mercy, Mo-Fragment. Its thought blazed and crackled in her head, bigger and louder than any enderman’s.

  Mo froze, a chorus fruit halfway to her face. It knows my name! How does it know my name?

  You must be famous, thought Fin. Mo felt his jealousy sizzle in her head.

  The ender dragon banked and came round again. It screeched into the void.

  Hark, Fragment Fin.

  It knows my name too! Wow! The ender dragon turned sharply around a distant pillar. Hark? What kind of a noise is that? Is it sick? Is it going to throw up? You got all that stuff about mercy. I got “hark.”

  It means “hello,” Mo giggled in the depths of her mind.

  Oh! Hello, ED! Hellllooooo! Hark! Maybe it’ll be friends with us! Do you think? Mo?

  Mo wasn’t so sure. It was coming straight for them now. The purple fire in its eyes didn’t exactly look like it meant to make friends. This time, as the creature flew by, it dragged its dark wing over the top of their pillar, knocking them over like they weighed nothing at all.

  NOW GO AWAY! ED bellowed in their minds. The crystal lantern next to them guttered in fear. The dragon’s tail snapped in the air like a whip and it dove away into the darkness.

  That. Was. Fin thought.

  So. Awesome! Mo finished for him. Their purple eyes glittered with glee.

  Mo grabbed a handful of the silver netting that surrounded the lantern. She could never resist a little more loot.

  Race you home! she thought happily, and vanished.

  Fin vanished after her.

  Fin sat on a lump of yellow hill on the very edge of Telos. He munched his chorus fruit and stared down at the courtyard below him. It forked off from the main tower of one of the smaller pagodas in the city. Above it, banners hung still in the windless night. Below it, nothing but darkness.

  But inside the courtyard? Inside it was the Enderdome.

  Mo didn’t like to come up here. If they don’t want us, I don’t want them, she always said. Then she buried herself in something or other so she didn’t have to keep talking about it. But Fin couldn’t stop himself. He loved to watch the enderfrags learning, dueling, playing, sparring, drilling, even their unofficial feuds and brawls. He stayed close enough to stack with them and keep from going totally dangry (dumb and angry, Fin’s own word for what endermen alone were like), but far enough away that no one could chase him off. This was where enderfrags trained to survive in the Overworld. To serve the Great Chaos. To fight humans. Fin told his twin he didn’t care about the Overworld. She could see his thoughts, so it was true, or she would have called him out. But only partly true. Only mostly. Fin didn’t care about going up to the big, bright, hot place. But he longed to train with the other fragments in the Enderdome. And the whole point of the Enderdome was to go up to the Overworld someday and punch anything you found there to pieces. He imagined himself in the Dome with the others: top of the class, popular, with ten or even twenty people to talk to any time he had a spare thought, instead of just his twin and a cranky shulker at the end of every day.

  They were doing teleportation today. Flickering in and out of sight, up to the top of the tower and back down. Out into the hills and back to the courtyard. Here, there, and everywhere. I could do that, Fin thought. I could do it so good. Better than at least half of them. Three quarters, maybe. Yeah. Definitely three quarters.

  Okay, maybe he couldn’t do it that well here. But back home? On his ship? Fin could disappear and reappear like a deck of cards shuffling. Ace, King, Queen, Jack. Bow, stern, hold, crow’s nest. No problem. But that’s why he needed to be in the Enderdome with all the other enderfrags! So he could learn to do it everywhere, not just where he felt safe and comfortable. It wasn’t fair.

  Sometimes, when you teleported, it felt like you passed through other places on your way to the place you were going. As though the world got thin when you punched through it like that and you could see through to other Ends almost like this one but…but more peaceful, quieter, more full of everything good and useful. Fin wanted to ask about those other places, but he wasn’t allowed to train, so he didn’t have anyone to ask. The injustice of it burned.

  But what stung, what really stung, was that Fin and Mo were actually pretty smart, just the two of them. Much smarter than the average enderman alone, if you asked Fin. Or Mo. They never got dangry back home on their ship, far aw
ay from anyone else. Imagine how clever they could be if they were allowed to go to the Dome with the other fragments! Endermen were always cleverest in groups, the bigger the group the better. If they were this good as a two-stack, the twins could be gods with two dozen. But they’d never get the chance.

  Mo didn’t think they needed training in the least. She’d even told him so that morning, as he was heading out. Well, not morning, not really. That was Overworld talk. Order talk. But you could make a kind of day and night out of the glow of the end rods. They got brighter and duller on a pretty regular schedule. You could think of them as a clock. If you wanted to. But that was a little bit of blasphemy. Making Order out of Chaos. Time out of timelessness. It was…naughty. And therefore thrilling. So, every once in a while, the twins let themselves be bad. They thought of the time when the rods shone brightest as morning, and the time when they dimmed a bit as night. But they never told anyone they’d done it.

  There’s nothing they can teach us that we haven’t learned ourselves, Mo had thought to him that “morning.” We can build, we can hoard, we can travel, we can fight, we can think as straight and as clear as the path between the ender dragon’s home and the outer islands. I like our life the way it is. I don’t see why it should ever change. Just like you said before. You don’t want to go to the Overworld? Well, I don’t want to go to the Dome. That’s how you know we’re twins. We’re the same, even when we’re different. You don’t have to go to the stupid Enderdome to learn how to sit back and have fun.

  The funny thing was, Fin knew she didn’t really mean that. She didn’t just like their lives the way they were. He caught her staring off into the void lots of times, dreaming of something, someone, somewhere. She would never tell him what. And he didn’t pry. He could have found out if he wanted to be a jerk about it. Go peeping into the parts of Mo’s mind she didn’t broadcast. But that would have been rude, and he would’ve hated it if she’d done it to him. Fin let her have her secrets so that he could keep his. It was only fair. Fairness was a kind of Order, he knew. But secrets were seeds of Chaos, so he figured it all balanced out in the end. Either way, he knew Mo wasn’t quite as happy as she pretended. A brother always knows.

  Their one and only friend, an enderman named Kan, didn’t understand his fixation with the Enderdome at all. I hate training, he always told them. I am compelled by my hubunits to attend every day and it is boring and violent and it hurts when the other frags hit me. Taskmaster Owari never stops droning on about humans and the Great Chaos, and I spend the whole time wishing I were somewhere else, playing my music with nobody pummeling me. I even wish to be home, and I do not like home much either. When I complain, the Taskmaster only tells me that if I get stronger it will not hurt anymore. Or if I get faster they will not be able to land a blow on me. But I do not want to be strong or fast. I only want the opposite of hurt. You are so lucky you do not have to go to the Dome. Do not tell me any more about how wonderful you believe it is. You do not know. But if it will make you feel better, I can hit you several times very hard.

  But Fin didn’t feel very lucky. He felt like a fragment with no hubunits, an orphan with no place in the world. He felt like a freak. Fin just wanted to be normal. He just wanted to be like the rest of them. Why couldn’t he be? Why did his hubunits have to go to the Overworld in the first place? Why couldn’t life just be good, instead of lonely, cast-off garbage? But of course, that wasn’t fair. Life was good sometimes. And the grown-up endermen had never been cruel about it. They just…didn’t know what to do with the twins. They were friendly enough when Fin and Mo went into Telos for supplies or to see the lights on Endermas, the great holiday when all the endermen celebrated the birth of the Great Chaos, the beauty of their land, and the strength of their family groups. Their own private Ends. Of course, the twins weren’t allowed to celebrate Endermas properly. You couldn’t, really, without an End. It was the one day of the year all the endermen made music, singing carols together in vast End clusters. But the twins loved to watch the lights all the same. From afar. From the outside. Like everything else in their world.

  Greetings, Fin. Greetings, Mo. The adult endermen would always think when they saw them on the streets. Are you not afraid to venture alone and weakened after the misfortune which has befallen your life?

  Thanks for bringing it up, Fin always shot back, and it usually shut them up.

  It wasn’t too long till Endermas now. He would have to think of something special to get Mo and Kan and Grumpo.

  Suddenly, an enderfrag flashed into the grass next to him. She was small and stocky, shorter than Fin. Her black skin crackled with purple energy. The enderfrag turned to stare at him.

  When you made contact with another person’s thoughts for the first time, you usually saw something welcoming. Whatever it was told you a lot about the person you were sharing minds with. Like a snapshot of their soul. When he looked into Mo’s head, the image of their ship greeted him. The door to the hold was always open, and the interior always full of treasure and little beasties from all over the End. Even a tiny ender dragon perched on one of the torches. She loved animals, even though she’d never really seen any other than ED and shulkers and endermites. But she’d heard people talk about the pigs and cows and sheep and foxes and turtles and squid of the Overworld a million times, so she imagined she knew all about them. Mo’s mind looked like a home full of happy animals that looked almost but somehow, at the same time, not at all like actual pigs and cows and sheep and foxes and turtles and squid. When Fin looked into Kan’s thoughts, he saw musical notes dancing in beautiful spirals. Kan loved music that much. Of course, Fin couldn’t see into his own head, because he lived in it. But Mo told him his was a beautiful, friendly room full of open books and pens to write in them, lying on every table and chair and the floor, too.

  When he looked at this enderman’s mind, Fin saw her End, all those hubunits and fragments and nubs standing close together, arms tangled around one another other until you couldn’t tell where one stopped and another began.

  Ugh. She was the worst.

  By the Great Chaos, I believe I have journeyed too far and too swiftly, she gasped in his mind. I believe you have done likewise, friend! Shall we go back together?

  Good job, Fin mumbled.

  His envy burned him up inside. In a minute, she was going to flicker back to the Enderdome and he’d still be by himself with a half-eaten chorus fruit. They looked alike. But they were nothing alike. They weren’t friends. They could never be friends. Even the way she thought, all those pretty, formal words. Trying to sound like grown-ups, like the big, tall endermen with their elegant telepathic speeches. Just because she was in the Dome and grown-ups liked her and probably told her she was doing a good job at being a lean, mean, human-stomping machine all the time. Well, those lovely thoughts wouldn’t last. They were pretty far from the Dome now. The stack wouldn’t hold. Fin had a lot of practice stacking at a distance. You had to, if you lived on the outskirts of everything. But she had no practice at all. If she stayed here more than a few minutes, just the two of them, her thoughts would be more like: Me strong. You stupid. And then she’d probably hit him and he’d have to decide whether it served the Great Chaos to hit her back.

  Attend a moment, the enderfrag thought. Fin could feel her mind curling away from his. He knew that feeling. All the normal fragments did it when they realized who he was. One of them. One of the weird ones. One of the orphans. One of the Endless twins who lived out on that broken old ship like shulkers. The back of Fin’s neck prickled all over. Pins and needles, like a foot that had fallen asleep. That was what it felt like when an enderman snickered nastily at you.

  I do not know you, the fragment went on. Fin squirmed. You are not in my training cluster. Why have you escaped the Dome? Where is your hubunit? Where is your End? It is lonely out here on the dunes. These are the hours of instruction. You are not allowed to be alone duri
ng those hours. No enderfrag is.

  I am, thought Fin sharply. I am allowed, and my twin is, too.

  The fragment narrowed her magenta eyes, trying to work it out. I don’t get it.

  There it was. Her thoughts were slipping. Too much time away. Too much time unstacked. My name is Fin. My twin is Mo. You’re Koneka, right?

  That is correct. Koneka shook her head. Yeah. Koneka. But how can you know Koneka, if Koneka does not know you? Why are you out here alone and not in training with us? Alone is dangerous. Come back with Koneka.

  I have no End, Fin snapped. I have no hubunits! And because I have no hubunits, the Endmoot decided I and my twin must live apart and not go to the Enderdome with you and all your happy little friends. Without an End, we could never be clever enough to deserve training. So they said.

  Oh, thought Koneka.

  “Oh” is right, thought Fin. But I can do anything you can do. You’ll see. Someday. When you think about it, I and my twin are TRUE spawn of the Great Chaos. Family groups are a kind of Order, not that anyone around here notices. And I’m free of it, unlike you.

  I am gonna go now, Koneka thought sheepishly. Dunno what do or say. So I go.

  Fine, Fin thought, and kicked the grass.

  I am.

  Do it then.

  I go.

  So go.

  The enderfrag glared at him. You stupid, she thought nastily.

  Koneka vanished.

  Fin stood up and walked the few short paces to the edge of the grassy island. After a moment, he pitched his fruit over the side. He wasn’t hungry anymore. The young enderman watched it tumble end over end into the void. She’s stupid, he thought. They’re all stupid. It doesn’t matter.

  But it did.

  Of course it did.

  * * *

  —

  Mo perched on one of the high obsidian pillars on the central island of the End. She rested her back against the silver cage that held the flickering crystal flames that lit the place like little trapped moons.