The End: An Official Minecraft Novel

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Brains? piped up Loathsome.

  No, Mo snapped back.

  “She had a name, Jax. Do you know her name? Because I do. You have no right to it. Give it here. I’ll take it home. I’ll take care of it. It’s mine.”

  “I mean, it’s not yours. You aren’t an enderman. You’re not one of them. You seem to be having a lot of trouble with that. I have a lot more right to it than you. And no, I don’t want to know her name, that’s fricking creepy. All ender pearls look the same and are the same and I like it like that. Look at it this way, if you kill something, doesn’t it honor that thing to use all its parts and not let anything go to waste? I honor the strength and power of your weird monster friend. So I will make sure to honor what is left of her by using it in strength and power.” But Jax saw the look on Mo’s face and knew she wouldn’t let it go. “Fine, whatever, take it. I have tons of them. I don’t care.”

  Jax tossed the pearl behind him. Mo scrambled in the grass for it. It was still warm. Poor Lopp. She couldn’t stop wondering why Lopp had been so far from Telos. Wasn’t everyone still preparing for war? No one knew the “war” was just four kids raiding for loot. It had to be something simple. Something she just wasn’t seeing. One enderman alone couldn’t hold on to a complicated thought.

  Mo squinted. Her eyes burned. She’d never seen sunlight. She didn’t know how to see it without hurting. It was just so bright. How could anyone stand it? That big burning ball of flame hanging over them all the time? And all those colors! (Blue for Fin’s eyes; green for hers.) They throbbed. So vivid and loud! Nothing like the soothing violet and soft yellow and comforting black of the End. Nothing like anything Mo had ever known.

  “Anything look familiar?” Jax asked. His voice was almost…nice.

  Mo tried. She really tried. “No,” she gave up. “I’ve never seen anything like this place. What is that?”

  Jax glanced around. “Pretty standard forest biome,” he said.

  “No, I mean that.” Mo pointed up. She couldn’t imagine what to call it. It was so big and heavy-looking. So alien.

  “That?” Jax followed her eyes. Then he looked back at Mo. Then up again. “That is a cloud,” he finished, shaking his head. “Koal was right. Wow. Just wow.”

  Loathsome stood up on wobbily, half-rotted legs. She nibbled experimentally at the grass. She swallowed. The grass slid down her throat and fell out of a hole in her stomach where her ribs showed through.

  “This way,” said Jax, walking off to the north. He walked with easy purpose and familiarity. This was his place.

  “Where are we going?” Mo asked, paralyzed with fear. “Do you think it’ll rain?”

  But it didn’t matter, did it? It didn’t matter if it rained. Because Mo was not an enderman. The rain couldn’t hurt her. She tried to think. She tried to remember. Tried to remember a time before the End. Tried to remember anything other than the End. Tried to remember a time when her life was green and blue and brown. When her life was this world, and not the other. But there was nothing there. Nothing. All she could remember was Fin and Kan and ED and the long night of her home. This was all so impossible.

  Mo looked at her horse. Loathsome seemed to have stopped growing, for the moment. She was big enough to ride, if you didn’t mind the mess. You still like me, don’t you? she said to the undead pony. You don’t mind whether I’m human or enderman.

  The pony turned and nuzzled her shoulder. It was a very wet, cold nuzzle. Then it was a sharp nuzzle.

  Hey! No biting.

  Loathsome looked confused. As she was growing older, she was beginning to understand some things about life as a zombie horse. Mumma. Mumma. B…B…Braaains? she asked, uncertain.

  No, Mo scolded. Bad horsey. No brains. At least not mine.

  Loathsome pawed the ground glumly. Braaaains, she complained.

  “You coming?” called Jax behind him.

  Mo didn’t want to, actually. She did not remotely appreciate being kidnapped out into the Overworld, a place she’d never really even wanted to visit, by a jerk who didn’t seem to care about much of anything but looting and killing ED. Well, the looting she could understand. But the ED-killing? Mo had to draw a line somewhere. The until-very-recently enderman followed anyway, though. If she lost sight of Jax, she’d never get back. She’d be stuck in this bright, loud, overwhelming place with no one. Mo scrambled up a little hillside after him. Loathsome did not understand why her mother did not simply ride her, preferably toward any fresh local brains. But she was still very new, and accepted such unexplainable choices.

  Reluctantly, Mo kept walking. It was the only option.

  On the other side of the hill sat Jax’s house. It was a very nice house. Honestly, it was an amazing house. Almost a castle. It had four towers, twenty windows, and three gargoyles. The walls were all strong grey stone. Mo, Jax, and Loathsome passed under a huge portcullis on the other side of a drawbridge over the little blue moat flowing all the way around the fortress. Torches burned on either side of every door and window. Pretty little patches of wheat and flowers grew around the banks of the moat. Loathsome stuck her oozing nose into the wheat and sniffed.

  Mumma! Graaaaains? she neighed, though it was really more of a phelgmy gurgle.

  Mo laughed a little. Sure, baby. All yours.

  The zombie pony kicked up her hind legs in joy. Bone showed through the grey, rotting skin. Her thick, ridged, toenaily hooves glinted dully in the sun. She mowed through a patch of wheat so fast Jax couldn’t shoo her off his landscaping in time.

  “Ugh,” he said helplessly as the pony started on his flowers. “Can you not…leak on my garden?”

  But Mo didn’t seem to care about the murky spinal fluid beading up and dribbling off of Loathsome’s body onto his lawn.

  “Come on,” Jax sighed, resigned to losing his front yard entirely. “The sun’s going down. You don’t want to be caught outside at night. Trust me.”

  They left the horse to her first feast and started over the bridge.

  Mo jogged a little to keep up. “You’re so lucky you found this place! If I were you I’d never leave it! You never know who might try to take it while you’re gone.”

  “Well, first of all, I didn’t find it, I built it.”

  “All by yourself?”

  Jax straightened up a bit, quite proud. “All by myself. Took ages. Even designed the gargoyles. But really, it’s not that good. There’re way bigger castles and stuff farther inland. Some of them are even mine! I was just figuring things out when I built this. I’ve done way better ones since. But this one’s my favorite, because it was my first.”

  “I didn’t realize you built things. I thought you just killed them.” Maybe Jax wasn’t really so bad. Anyone who could build something so magnificent couldn’t be that bad.

  Jax waved his hand dismissively. “Oh, I don’t really do much building anymore. This is all old stuff, from when I was a kid. I got bored. I was spending all my time fighting off creepers and zombies and chasing them away from my houses. Then I realized I could just chase them, whenever I wanted, and I didn’t need any houses for that at all! Way more exciting. I never get bored anymore. Hey! What are you doing! Stop that!”

  Mo snatched her hand back guiltily. Where a moment ago there had been a smooth, unbroken stone wall, there was now a square hole.

  “All hail the Great Chaos,” whispered Mo.

  She’d hardly even known what she was doing before it was done. It had been automatic, like a reflex.

  “Sorry!”

  “What did you do? What’s wrong with you? I just told you how long it took me to build this place.”

  “I couldn’t help it! It’s just so beautiful and perfect.”

  “Yeah, it is! So what the crap?”

  “You designed it all so…so precisely. It’s so complete. So correct. So…so Orderly.
”

  “SO WHAT? YOU WRECK IT?” Jax looked down at her with disgust. “Of course you do. Because you’re an enderman. That’s what you do. You see something good and you punch a hole in it.”

  “I served the Great Chaos,” Mo argued, steeling her spine. “You do what humans do—you see something and you kill it!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The universe! Lopp!”

  “YOU’RE A CRAZY PERSON!” Jax screamed, and stomped off into the house. The portcullis opened into a long hallway with a lot of heads of various exotic creatures on the walls and, naturally, more torches.

  “I made it better!” Mo yelled after him. “Now it’s perfect, because it’s imperfect!”

  “Shut up, mob!” Jax yelled back. “I don’t have to listen to crazy people!”

  Mo ran down the long hallway to catch up with him. Loathsome ran after her. By the time they got to the boy, both were out of breath. Loathsome because her lungs had been born rotting. Mo because she’d never had to breathe the air of the Overworld before. It was so rich and full her body didn’t know what to do with it.

  “Jax,” she panted. “Listen. I’m not crazy. Well, maybe I am, but not because of this. The universe was created in a battle between the Great Chaos and the Forces of Order. They struggled against each other for eons. Sometimes Chaos prevailed, and made the endermen, and the shulkers, and the creepers, and fire itself. Sometimes Order prevailed, and made humans and sheep and pigs and medicine and stones and trees. Finally, their conflict ended as it always must: in a draw. They looked around and all their creations surrounded them: They had made the universe. So everything serves either the Great Chaos or the Forces of Order, and they will always fight. It’s in their nature. I served the Great Chaos. I made your house better. More beautiful. More perfect.”

  “You made it weaker! Anyone could crawl in through that hole!”

  “Yes, yes, exactly! And if someone did, what amazing things might happen? What kind of exciting story might start for you? A dangerous one, even. They’re more exciting when they’re dangerous. You should never be able to predict what will happen next in life. That’s boring. That’s the Forces of Order. When Chaos reigns, everything is exciting, because anything could happen. Every second is a surprise. So you can’t get mad at endermen for perfecting your houses and all that, because we’re helping you, really. When you think about it.”

  “Okay,” said Jax with a little smile, the kind of smile that said he thought he’d won the argument already. “Then you can’t be mad at me for killing that enderman back there.”

  “Oh yes, I can.”

  “Oh no, you can’t. I was just serving the Great Chaos. She definitely couldn’t have predicted what happened to her. It was one hundred percent a surprise, I guarantee it. It was a very exciting story.”

  Mo didn’t know what to say to that. It sounded right and wrong at the same time. She didn’t want to let Jax be right about anything. But it certainly had been chaotic. She decided to change the subject.

  “What were you going to do with her pearl?” Mo asked hesitantly.

  Jax motioned for her to follow him down another stone hall. This one was much more narrow and less grand. “Teleport,” he said. “Maybe grind it up to make another ender chest. Dunno.”

  “I heard that humans can use pearls to teleport.” A thought suddenly occurred to Mo. “Wait a minute,” she said, stopping in the middle of the grey cobblestone hallway. “Fin and I have always been able to teleport. And if we aren’t endermen, we don’t have ender pearls. So how could we do that? We teleported just fine. All day long.”

  Jax looked her up and down. He squinted one eye.

  “I bet I know,” he said. “Hold still.”

  Jax got up close to Mo. She didn’t like that at all. She didn’t like Jax. She didn’t like how he looked or how he talked or how he acted. She didn’t like that he’d grabbed her off her ship. The only thing she liked even a little bit about the big human kid was that he’d given her the chestplate back, and been quite nice about it. He seemed to be everything she’d been taught humans were: loud, aggressive, greedy, rude, and eager to take anything he wanted.

  You’re a human, though, Mo thought to herself. If humans are those things, so are you. And how else did you get an entire ship full of treasure than by taking what you wanted when you wanted it?

  Jax stuck his hand into Mo’s pocket. Pocket! She had pockets! She’d never thought about pockets before. Ever. Endermen don’t need them. He scrabbled around in there for a minute, scrunching up his face. His face was so close to hers. She’d never been so close to a human. Except Fin. But she hadn’t known Fin was human, had she?

  He’d been in there a while. How big could a pocket be? Finally, Jax squared his feet and pulled out, one after the other, a strange pale-gold doll, a black egg, and an ender pearl so old its dust was covered in dust. It looked like a collapsed balloon. As soon as the air hit it, the pearl started falling apart.

  Jax and Mo stared at the egg, the doll, and the pearl.

  “You have a totem of undying,” Jax whispered, stunned. “Where did you get that?”

  “How should I know? I didn’t know I had pockets till just now. But that stuff is heavy. How could I be carrying it and not know?”

  The ender pearl bubbled into mush and began to seep down through the floorboards. There goes teleportation, Mo thought.

  “Pockets,” Jax said slowly, his mind clearly working through something else entirely. “It’s a human thing. It’s not really a pocket, it’s a shortcut to an empty block of space-time that can hold whatever you want because it’s both infinitely big and infinitely small at the same time. You don’t feel the weight or the bulk of your stash. There’re limits, but mostly you can carry anything, no problem. You could teleport because you had an ender pearl the whole time. So you’re no better than me. That pearl belonged to somebody, too. You probably killed them for it.”

  “I did not!” cried Mo. “I wouldn’t!”

  But it was so obvious that Jax didn’t really care about the pearl or the totem. He reached out his fingers toward the black egg. He seemed almost afraid to touch it. The loud, obnoxious boy was suddenly reverent. Full of awe.

  “Are you ok?” Mo asked.

  “Sorry,” Jax muttered, shaking his head. “Look, I’m sorry, I know you’re having a whole identity crisis or whatever, but what the actual crap, Mo? Why do you have a dragon egg? How do you have a dragon egg?”

  “Is that a dragon egg?”

  “Is that a dragon egg?” Jax screeched in a high-pitched, mocking tone. “YES, THAT’S A DRAGON EGG, YOU MELON. Where did you get it?”

  “I DON’T KNOW, YOU…” Mo wasn’t used to insulting people in human terms. She stumbled. “DOUBLE MELON.”

  Jax shook his head in disbelief. “You’ve been lying to me this whole time!”

  “No, I haven’t!”

  “You’re so high and mighty! Trying to lecture us on right and wrong, killing and not killing. Making me feel bad about myself. Making me feel like I’m scum. And the whole time you were carrying around a dragon egg like it’s no big deal. Well, it is a big deal, you freak. And it’s only a slightly bigger deal than having a totem of undying when you’re supposed to be this poor little lost orphan with amnesia. There’s no way you just found those things. No one would ever be so careless as to drop one or leave it lying around. In fact, there’s no way that egg should even exist. You’re not going anywhere until we figure this out. Because there’s only one way to get a dragon egg for yourself.”

  “And what’s that?”

  Jax frowned. “You have to kill the ender dragon.”

  Jax, Mo, and Loathsome had been gone for no more than a few hours.

  Fin couldn’t remember ever going so long without seeing his twin. Without knowing she was safe and nearby
. Without talking to her. It made him nervous. It made him feel unsteady, like he could just tumble off into the night at any moment. The others seemed to have lost a little interest in him once Jax had taken off with Mo. They had other priorities. The mystery could wait until their friend came back.

  In the meantime, they were very busy.

  The humans were building something.

  Roary, Koal, and Jesster all had pairs of soft grey wings attached to their backs. They used them to glide from the ship to a smallish island off the port side where they were working. Fin knew what they were. Elytra. A couple of days ago he’d had dozens of pairs of his own. Now, Roary and Koal had to carry him between them when they flew over to their new base. They didn’t need anything from the ship. There wasn’t much left there anyway, except the small mountain of enchanted books. But Roary wanted them all to stick together over on the new beachhead. She didn’t want to leave Fin alone back there.

  Fin watched them make quick work of that little island. It was dizzying. Their hands moved so fast and so cleverly. Fin looked down at his own hands. He didn’t think he could ever do anything like that. That confident. That purposeful. That casual. They must have had some kind of blueprint for whatever they were building, but they never seemed to need to reference it or argue amongst themselves over where to put the next cornerpiece or anything.

  Roary and Jesster attacked the grove of chorus trees at the north end of the island. They hacked them up for the wood before Fin could begin to explain how to make chorus corn from the fruits. Koal got busy carving blocks of end stone, the very stuff of the land in the End, out of a little cliff on the west side. Fin didn’t think that would be enough to make anything too impressive. You’d have to mine half the islands in the End to build something as big as Telos. And it looked like that was about the size of their plan. But when they pooled the chorus trees and stone at the building site on a flat meadow in the center of the isle, protected by gentle hills on all sides, it quickly became clear the humans weren’t relying on just what they could scavenge here.