“Chaos abhors a cycle,” Fin said. He didn’t know where that came from. It just popped into his head.
“There he is. There’s the Fin I know. Of course, it’s not entirely true. Scripture is like that sometimes. It sounds very clever, but the truth is so much more complicated. The cycle has never troubled me. I exist within the cycle. I set the cycle in motion. It’s you two that broke it.”
“How? What have we done?” Mo asked.
“You’re stuck,” said Grumpo. His voice sounded thick and wet. “And you cannot get out.” The shulker’s face, as much as a shulker had a face, grew serious. There was something almost like pity in his grey, milky eyes. “Oh, I have tried to help you. I told you not to let Kan on board. I told you to kill the humans. I told you you would be happier if you let me bite them. I even told Kan he could stay with me forever, because that would have been something different. Something chaotic. But you never listen. Not until it is too late. There will come a moment, after it is done but before it all begins again, when you will remember everything. You will know it all. What has come before a thousand times. What will come again. And you will cry your eyes out because you are human and that’s what you do. I don’t say that to mock you. It’s nice that you can still cry. Gods cannot.”
“Grumpo, please.”
“I am not Grumpo.”
“But you are,” Fin insisted. “Part of you is. You can’t live with us for so long and guard us from intruders and eat our popcorn without being a little bit ours. Our good boy.”
The Great Chaos sighed. He squelched resentfully on the purple stone. Then, he spoke.
“I have said all this before and I will say it again. I hate you, Fin. I hate you, Mo. I hate you more than the last time I told you I hated you,” Grumpo began. “The ender dragon is the heart of this world. It beats in the center of the End, round and round in circles, steady as a pulse. Nothing works without ED. And since the beginning, humans have come questing after it. To find ED and kill it for no particular good reason other than that it is killable. Every time my poor doggo dies, another one must be born. That cycle was perfectly acceptable. A world must have a heart. The ender dragon vanishes, an egg appears in its place, and a new ender dragon rises. But something as powerful and ancient and loyal to the Great Chaos who is its master does not die without leaving…a wake. Let’s call it that. When a ship passes by at great speed, the sea churns and ripples after it as water is displaced and replaced again. That is what happens when the ender dragon dies. What is going to happen in about…oh, I would wager ten to fifteen minutes, give or take. A great wake pulses out from its body. It travels through the End like the tide. It touches everything and everyone. And it makes them forget. The world resets. What came before is gone. There is only the now.”
“Why? How can that be good for anyone?” asked Mo.
“Why does your body respawn when you die?” Grumpo shrugged as well as he could without shoulders. “It is how ED decomposes. You shouldn’t judge. You always were very judgey, Ultimo. It’s a nasty habit.”
“I am not Ultimo!” snapped Mo in frustration. “I’m just Mo! Just a girl with a ship and a horse and a twin.”
The shulker laughed throatily. “Of course you’re Ultimo. Ultimo the Magnificent. Supreme Brewmaster Ultimo. Do you think zombie horses listen to everyone? Sort yourself out, child. And you, you are El Fin the Archmage, the Flame in the Night. You were famous back home. Everyone wanted to learn from you. Ultimo lived in a vast graveyard with every kind of plant and mineral at her beck and call—people always get buried with their best loot. They used to say Ultimo could brew a potion to do anything under the sun or moon. Impossible things. Things no one else would even think of. El Fin lived in the desert, in a palace made entirely of torches. You met by chance, as far as I can tell. The two of you geniuses came down to the End for your turn at killing my dog many cycles ago. And you did it, didn’t you? Bang—right between the eyes. But you just had to gloat. You didn’t hop through your exit portal with your prize like most people. You stayed for ages and got caught in my poor puppy’s wave of amnesia because you were just too proud of yourselves to practice basic personal safety. Disgusting. And so you go. Over and over.
“Some cycles are short. Some long. But they all end the same way. When you wake up, your pumpkins keep the Endermen from seeing who you really are, and of course you don’t remember. The death of the ender dragon washes your mind so clean you can actually hear the thoughts of the endermen. Human minds are usually too noisy for that. And so you make certain assumptions. Humans are so good at making patterns out of nothing. Order out of…well, me. You patch over anything that doesn’t fit. You make it fit. You look around at a ship and presume it’s your home. You meet your neighbors and all of you are far too embarrassed to admit you don’t remember one another so you invent reasons why you’re feeling so out of sorts that morning. You do not need to stack, like the other endermen, to retain your mind, and you assume you must simply be…special. Not that you were never one of them. You see a shulker in a box and assume he’s your pet. You have no parents, so there must be a story that explains why they’re gone. And what archmage obsessed with fire does not hate the rain? Even when you would not know your own face in the mirror, some part of you remembered that. And then? You meet a strange boy who seems to like you, and imagine that you have been friends all your life. Mortal imaginations are astonishing. It’s never more than a day before the End forgets that it’s forgotten anything at all.”
Mo looked inside herself. Was it true? Was it real? Was she Ultimo the Magnificent? But there was nothing. She couldn’t remember any of it.
“What about Kan?” she asked. “He’s not like us. He’s not human.”
Grumpo shut his eyes. “Ah, Kan. My enderman. My best enderman. I am the Great Chaos. The unknown variable is the gift I bring to the world. Kan is simply…Kan. He was born different. Those green eyes. A mutation. Mutations are the most valuable things in the universe. Without mutation, nothing ever changes. Because he was different, he did not belong. Because he did not belong, he sought out strangers when they came, hoping they would love him as his own people refused to. Don’t get excited—you treated him no better than anyone else. Not during that first cycle. When the ender dragon’s wave caught you, he was hiding nearby, trying to work up the nerve to talk to the beautiful brewmaster. And when you woke up…”
“He was there, so we thought we were connected,” Fin filled it in.
“Yes. But that is the miracle of mutation. By imagining that you were connected, you became connected. Where there is Fin and Mo there is always Kan, now. And he has spent so much time with you, his thoughts embedded into the very brains of a pair of powerful humans, that he has developed beyond any other enderman I have ever known. The cycle has been messing with all my endermen. Each one of them bends and breaks and warps a little more with each version of this tiresome story. Or else they would never have thought to make Kraj a commander or organize an army or even make poor Eresha into the Mouth of the Great Chaos. Before all this started, none of them would have even dreamed of such fancy things! And frankly, it’s terrible. Have you met Kraj? Ugh. He’s such a bore. But Kan has changed the most. He’s nearly human himself these days. And that music. That music. He is my proof. He is my justification. Kan’s song is the illustration of all I am. From chaos comes beauty. You three became an End in yourselves. No one could have predicted it.”
“How many cycles have there been?” Mo felt numb.
“This will be the thousandth cycle,” answered the god of the endermen.
Fin and Mo gave up. They sprawled out on the floor and just lay there, unhappy and overwhelmed. Gravity was too much to bear just then.
“Why not just tell us?”
“What fun would that be? I told you. I tried to help. I tried to tell you. I tried to make each cycle different. But you are so stubborn! Hu
mans love Order. They can’t get enough of it. And you insist on being yourselves over and over.”
“Wait…are we twins? Grumpo, is Mo my twin?”
The shulker chortled. “As I understand things, which is quite deeply, you met two weeks before you passed through your gate into the End. You are near strangers to each other. Isn’t that just fabulous?”
“We have to break the cycle,” Fin said finally. “That’s all there is to it. We get out. And then we won’t be stuck and everything will be normal forever.”
The god of Chaos laughed.
“You always say that, Archmage. I have heard it nine hundred and ninety-nine times.”
Mo didn’t laugh. Mo frowned. She thought about Loathsome and Kan. She thought about Jess and Jax and Roary and Koal. She thought about Kraj and Eresha and Karshen and the note block echoing in the rainy night of the Overworld. It was all her End. If their shulker wasn’t lying, they must have lived down here much longer than they ever lived up there. And until a few days ago, they’d been so happy.
“There,” Grumpo crooned. “There’s your trouble, Fin. She likes it here.”
Fin ignored that. “You say this has all happened before. I read the books. I know you are at least telling part of the truth. But what about them? The humans fighting ED up there? Jess? Have they been part of the cycle before?”
Grumpo seemed surprised, almost. Taken aback. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “They are new.”
“So there’s a chance,” Fin leapt up. “There’s a chance we can change things. We can break the cycle and escape. We’ll take Kan with us, Mo, if that’s what you’re worried about. We’ll take him and we’ll start a new life. Build a house. Till a field. Together.” Mo looked so uncertain. “If we’re together, everything will be okay. That’s how the universe works. Weren’t you listening?”
Fin grinned at Mo. The old playful grin she’d known all her life. All her life that mattered.
“Ooh, I can’t wait to see how this turns out,” Grumpo snarked. “What suspense.”
Something crashed down on top of the box. Dust trickled down through the stones.
“You’d better hurry,” Grumpo said as if it didn’t matter at all to him. The pair got up to go. They climbed the platform stairs toward the lid of the box.
“Please, my children,” the Great Chaos called to them in a suddenly soft, gentle voice. “Remember, no matter what happens, no matter what you do or say, no matter if you live or die, no matter if you achieve your dreams or drink their ashes, I will always, always hate you. Until the end of time, I will hate you more than anything in the cosmos.”
Fin frowned. A strange idea came into his head. “Grumpo, when you say you hate us, do you really mean you love us? Is this a Great Chaos thing? Are words meaning the same thing as the dictionary says they mean too much Order for you? It’s a pretty terrible joke, you know.”
“You wish,” snorted the shulker. He nodded behind him. “Please exit through the gift shop,” he joked to himself. Neither Fin nor Mo laughed. They didn’t know what a gift shop was.
The sound of the door closing echoed through the Great Chaos’s lair.
“See you back on the ship,” he said to the shadows.
Ultimo the Magnificent and El Fin the Archmage exploded out of the shulker’s box. They landed on a battlefield already burning.
The enderman holiday choir hid behind pillars or simply fled. The ender dragon roared in injured fury. It dodged and flew between the pillars, bleeding freely from one wing. Jess and Koal were encamped in the center of the island on the stone courtyard, weapons drawn, waiting for ED to drop low enough to end it all. Roary ran between them, doling out healing potions. Jax whooped and hollered. He danced in the scorched earth. He reloaded his crossbow for the killshot.
“No!” cried Mo. She leapt at him and knocked the arrow out of his hand.
“You melon,” he snarled. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll explain later!”
Jax rolled his eyes and shrugged her off. It was time for battle and he had no interest in listening to her innermost thoughts.
The ender dragon saw them. Its white eyes blazed. It folded its wings and dove straight for them.
“Yeah! Let’s go! This is it!” Jax laughed with delight. “Final checks, everyone! Got your coats? Got the keys? Anybody need to go to the bathroom? No? Then let’s DO THIS!” He notched another arrow and put the dragon in his sights. He fired.
ED opened its monstrous purple jaws. It ate the arrow like it was nothing.
Then it ate Jax.
It happened right in front of Mo. One minute he was there, dancing from foot to foot, trash-talking an ancient deity’s favorite pet. The next minute he was gone. A lonely bow fell from the sky.
“Oh my god,” gasped Fin. “Oh my god.”
“ED, stop!” screamed Mo. “It’s me! It’s me!”
But ED was the infinite lightning night-lizard at the end of the universe and it didn’t care. ED was doing what it was made to do. Protect the End from outsiders. Nothing else mattered. And Mo was an outsider, too. She’d never been anything but.
The ender dragon turned on her. With a shriek it swooped down to devour her as well. Mo took off at a dead run. But it wasn’t just ED. Everyone was shrieking. Everyone was screaming. Everything burned around them.
Kan? Mo thought wildly. Where was Kan? Where had he teleported to? Was he safe? Fin shoved her down just as ED pulled up, catching his upper arm with one claw. El Fin the Archmage cried out in pain.
Mo ate sand. This. This is the Great Chaos. Death and battle. It seems like a game until everything’s on fire and your friend is dead.
Roary tossed her a healing potion from behind a pillar. The dim light of the End caught the glass bottle. It sparkled briefly—and then ED barreled through again. The bottle shattered. A rain of healing misted down, too diffuse to help anyone.
Especially Roary. Lying face down on the rock. Her eyes closed.
Fin screamed wordlessly. No, no, no! They knew now! They were supposed to be fixing the cycle! Everything was supposed to be okay!
“Help!” yelled Koal over the din. “Fin, Mo! Help!”
They scrambled over the broken stones through the storm of flame and debris toward Jess and Koal. A pair of endermen had them pinned down, punching at them with bare fists.
“Karshen,” breathed Mo.
It was Kan’s secondary hubunit. And Koneka, the fragment Fin had met outside the Enderdome. The fragment from Kraj’s brainbank squad. Two wasn’t quite enough to achieve enlightenment. It was just enough to be really good at fighting and know why you wanted someone dead.
Fin searched the ground—a sword. Someone’s, anyone’s. No. Not anyone’s. His. Theirs. Their treasure. Borrowed by an enderman and left where it lay. Mo was already crawling toward a trident.
She was closer than he was. Fin waved to Mo.
Go, go, go! Go without me! I’ll be fine!
Karshen hit Koal over and over. Koneka went at Jess with bare teeth. Fin got his hand around the fallen sword. Mo rolled over with the trident clutched in her blistered fingers.
But it didn’t matter. Not much does when there’s a dragon involved. ED sped through the air toward the little grey courtyard. Fin’s legs pumped under him, willing the distance between him and Jess to disappear. Jess, who just wanted to build her library and live here in the End like they had. Jess, who saved him. Jess, who he saved. Jess, with her long brown hair and her constantly rolling eyes. Fin sobbed. He hadn’t even gotten a chance to tell her how glad he’d been that she wanted to stay.
Mo almost made it to them. She would have made it. But unknown variables will have their way.
Loathsome rocketed out of nowhere. Her bloodshot eyes streamed tears. The undead demon horse collided with her mother, knocking her out of the c
ourtyard. The mare turned round to look at Mo just as ED opened his mouth and emptied his gullet onto Jess, Koal, Karshen, Koneka, and Loathsome, engulfing them all with white-hot fire. The humans went to ash in an instant. Fin didn’t even have time to call Jess’s name. Koal’s face went slack with total disbelief, then drifted away like dust. Till the last second, he simply knew he was going to escape. He always escaped. Karshen dissolved into smoke. Koneka looked up at the infinite blackness of the End. It is lonely out here on the dunes, Fin heard her think, and then she was gone, too.
Loathsome burned. Her undead body was the candle. Her long mane was the wick. She burned and burned. Mo sobbed. She held her arms out to the horse, but she couldn’t touch her. The flames were too hot and fierce.
Mumma! Loathsome cried out in her mind. Slain. Slaaaaain. The dead horse stumbled to her knees.
Why, Loathsome? Mo’s thoughts were soaked in tears. Why didn’t you stay safe like we told you, you beautiful dummy? She stretched her arms out to the creature she could never touch again. Don’t die. Only dummies die.
Mo reached out into Loathsome’s gentle ghoulish soul for the last time. She saw the infinite graveyard. The wiry trees. The sickly moon. The gravestones, all written over with new things. EATING FLOWERS. RUNNING IN THE RAIN. MUSIC. CAGE IN THE SKY. MUMMA. DRAGON! MUMMA. ULTIMO THE MAGNIFICENT.
And one read: GOODBYE. A rotting, moldering hand scrabbled up out of the grave dirt.
I love you, Mo thought to the graveyard of her baby’s mind.
The hand waved sadly. Then it went still.
Fin and Mo stood in the middle of the carnage, slack-jawed. They’d never had a chance. How could anything happen that fast? It wasn’t fair. You couldn’t fix it. If it wasn’t fixable, it shouldn’t be allowed to happen that fast.
Through his tears, El Fin the Archmage whispered, “We can still break the cycle. If we find Kan. He can teleport three of us back to the Overworld. That’s not too much. ED’s still alive. If we leave now, it can’t start over again.”
The End: An Official Minecraft Novel Page 19
