The Voyage: An Official Minecraft Novel

by Jason Fry

  Minecraft: The Voyage is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Mojang AB and Mojang Synergies AB. All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  MINECRAFT is a trademark or registered trademark of Mojang Synergies AB.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Fry, Jason, author.

  Title: The voyage / Jason Fry.

  Description: New York: Del Rey, [2020] | Series: Minecraft

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019058056 (print) | LCCN 2019058057 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399180750 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780399180767 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593159231 (international edition)

  Classification: LCC PZ7.F9224 Voy 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.F9224 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019058056

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019058057

  Ebook ISBN 9780399180767

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook

  Cover art and design: M. S. Corley

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1: The House by the Sea

  Chapter 2: The Last Regular Day

  Chapter 3: The Visitor

  Chapter 4: Fire and Ruin

  Chapter 5: Into the Unknown

  Chapter 6: Into the Sea of Sorrows

  Chapter 7: Cornered

  Chapter 8: A Building Project

  Chapter 9: Gifts from the Sea

  Chapter 10: Back to Sea

  Chapter 11: A Perilous Journey

  Chapter 12: Guardians of the Light

  Chapter 13: A New Direction

  Chapter 14: The Caravan

  Chapter 15: Tumbles Harbor

  Chapter 16: Three Curious Characters

  Chapter 17: Down in the Hole

  Chapter 18: Strange Characters

  Chapter 19: The Unlucky Mine

  Chapter 20: The Accident

  Chapter 21: Stax Starts Again

  Chapter 22: Lurkers in the Dark

  Chapter 23: An Expedition

  Chapter 24: The Road to the Champion

  Chapter 25: The Champion, Revealed

  Chapter 26: Peril in Patannos

  Chapter 27: Encounter in Karamhés

  Chapter 28: The Mountain

  Chapter 29: Prisoners of Fouge Tempro

  Chapter 30: The Man in the Mountaintop Fortress

  Chapter 31: Duelists

  Chapter 32: Two Shores

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Jason Fry

  About the Author

  Of Stax Stonecutter and his three faithful companions

  In a house by the sea there lived a young man.

  In a few minutes I’ll tell you about the young man, who after all is the hero of this story. But first you ought to know something about the house, because it’s important to our tale as well.

  The house wasn’t a palace. You probably wouldn’t even call it a mansion. But it was big, and most people who saw it thought it was beautiful. It was built out of black-and-white speckled diorite, pink granite, and glass. The diorite and the granite had been carefully polished, so the first rays of the morning sun made the house seem to glow, like it was lit from within.

  The house had been built into the side of a green hill dotted with white birches, so it looked like it was part of the landscape, instead of something artificial that had been stuck in the middle of it. And the land around the house had been carefully reshaped to make it pleasing to the eye.

  If you approached the house by sea, you’d step off your boat at the end of a broad green lawn, with a line of birch trees to either side. To your right, you’d find a low hill covered with flowers of every color: roses and peonies and tulips and cornflowers and daisies. To your left, beside another low hill, you’d see pens for cattle and pigs and chickens and sheep, and above them you’d find lovingly tended rows of crops: wheat, beetroot, and carrots, and the squat squares of pumpkins and melons. Ahead and above you, you’d see the house. To reach it, you’d pass between the white birch trees, perhaps thinking they looked a little like soldiers on parade, walk around a cheerful fountain that splashed and burbled in a square of green lawn, and climb a broad flight of polished diorite steps until you stood at the front door.

  The young man who lived in the house was named Stax Stonecutter, and he was the third in the line of Stonecutters to call it home. Stax’s grandmother, the first Stonecutter anyone had ever heard of, had built a simple dwelling in the side of the hill many years before—little more than a cave chopped out of the dirt and rock. It was her son, Stax’s father, who’d enlarged the house and planted the trees and flowers and made the Stonecutter home into an impressive estate.

  Stax’s father and grandmother were dead now, buried alongside the rest of his family in a place of honor in the back garden. Stax lived alone, or almost alone. Three cats lived with him: a black one with golden eyes, a gray-striped one with green eyes, and a Siamese with blue eyes. They were called Coal, Emerald, and Lapis, after some of the rocks and minerals the Stonecutter family had mined from the ground over the years.

  Stax loved Coal, Emerald, and Lapis and considered them company enough for a happy life. In recent years he’d begun to talk with them, even though they never offered answers beyond swishes of the tail, purrs, or the occasional meow. Visitors to the Stonecutter estate had grown used to coming across Stax somewhere on the grounds, planting flowers or pruning tree limbs while chatting companionably with one or more of the cats, who more often than not would be asleep in the sun.

  The people who lived near the Stonecutter estate thought this behavior was a bit strange, but then everything about Stax struck them as at least a bit strange. His oldest neighbors remembered Stax’s grandmother as a skilled miner who never shied from marching into a dark hole in the ground and returned weighed down with rich minerals and marvelous treasures. The younger ones recalled Stax’s father as a great adventurer, a smiling man who loved traveling the world and meeting new people. Stax’s father had loved tales and he was pretty good at telling his own stories, and at convincing people he’d just met that they’d be happier if they bought the stone that the Stonecutters had mined and cut into polished blocks.

  All of the neighbors, regardless of how old they were, agreed that Stax was nothing like his grandmother or his father. He went to the Stonecutter office every few weeks to take care of family business, but as far as anyone knew he’d never traveled through the forests or across the plains, or set out on a journey from the Stonecutter boathouse to visit any of the lands his father had told such wonderful stories about. Everyone agreed Stax was skilled at mining and cutting stone, having learned this craft from his father and grandmother, but he never expressed interest in finding new mines and seeing what they might contain. People
who went to visit Stax at the big house by the sea said he was pleasant enough if you talked with him about cats or flowers, but if you tried to have a conversation with him about anything else, pretty soon he’d get a faraway look in his eye and start to fidget, and a few minutes after that he’d make some excuse—and not always a convincing one—and go back into his house.

  The kind neighbors felt sorry for Stax, who’d become an orphan when he was just a teenager, and asked what was really so wrong with being a homebody who was more interested in cats and flowers than in mines, which, miners would be the first to tell you, were always dark, often smelly, and sometimes dangerous. But the less kind neighbors said Stax was lucky the other members of his family had worked so hard for so many years so he didn’t have to work hard at all. And as the years went by and Stax got a little odder with each one, the less kind neighbors came to outnumber the kind ones.

  Now, there’s no way for me to know how old you are. You might be eight, or eighteen, or eighty-eight, or even eight hundred eighty-eight. (All right, you’re probably not eight hundred eighty-eight.) But no matter what the answer is, you know that it’s easy for people to be unkind about things they don’t actually know a lot about. So let me tell you about one day in Stax Stonecutter’s life: the day he came to think of as the last normal day he ever had, because it was the day before everything began to go so terribly wrong. Maybe if you know about that day and what came after it, you’ll be able to make up your own mind.

  Breakfast with the kitties * An unwelcome visitor * Duties on the estate * A job for an axe * Things are put right, however briefly

  This particular day began with a sunny morning. Stax woke up late, in the upstairs bedroom that had once belonged to his father, the one whose floor-to-ceiling windows were shielded from the morning sun by the bulk of the hill behind the back garden. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes and carefully lifted up Coal, who was sleeping on his chest, and then Emerald, who was sprawled across his knees. Neither cat woke up when set gently down amid the rumpled sheets, though Emerald gave a big yawn and stretched himself into a long, contented furry bow. Stax looked for Lapis and found the Siamese was already awake, sitting at the foot of Stax’s bed and giving herself a bath.

  “Good morning, kitties,” Stax said cheerfully, which earned him a purr from Lapis and a twitch of Coal’s ear. Still sleepy, Stax put on his robe and stretched, one hand ruffling his tousled hair.

  From the upstairs bedroom, a ladder led down to the main floor of the house, while a door opened onto a balcony overlooking the back garden. Before he opened the door to the balcony, Stax peered through the windows, in case a zombie or spider might be lurking nearby. But he wasn’t very worried. It was some time after dawn, late enough for any dangerous night creatures to have burned up or sought shelter from the sun. And the Stonecutter estate was dotted with lanterns set on diorite columns, carefully spaced to discourage evil things from approaching the house. There had been a spider lurking above the balcony one morning, one of the big ones that had a cluster of red eyes and was covered with black bristles. That had given Stax a fright and left him out of sorts for the better part of a week. When had that happened? Last summer, Stax thought, though he wasn’t entirely sure that it hadn’t been the summer before that.

  This time, there was no spider or any other monstrous thing to disturb the peace of the morning—just bright sunshine and a warm breeze. Reassured, Stax left the door open and leaned against the balcony railing, looking down into the back garden. Below, he could see the edge of the diorite swimming pool his father had built, half in sunlight and half in the shadow cast by a ceiling of rock and dirt. The water looked cool and inviting, and Stax decided that a dip in the pool would be an excellent way to end what he suspected would be a hot afternoon.

  Next to the pool, a wooden hatch sat on the edge of a lush green lawn. That was the entrance to the Stonecutters’ richest mine, with its deep central shaft. Farther away, under the oldest birches and near a sparkling blue waterfall, lay the graves of his parents and grandparents, surrounded by flowers. Stax’s eyes rose to the ridge on the far side of the back garden, and the diorite pillar that stood atop it, crowned by a brightly lit lantern. That marked the edge of the estate; beyond it, to the west, was a crescent-shaped bay, fringed with a beach and thick green forests.

  If Stax followed the shoreline, a day’s walk would take him past a Stonecutter mine on an island offshore, and then to a small house set into the side of a mountain surrounded by scrubland and acacia trees: a no-frills outpost his father had set up as a base for raising cattle and exploring the tunnels and lava tubes beneath the mountain, furnished with little more than a bed, furnace, chest, and crafting table. Stax hadn’t visited it since he was a child, and wondered if the outpost was still there. But of course it was—why would anything have changed?

  “No reason to go all that way, though, right Lapis?” Stax asked, reaching down to pet the Siamese, who was butting her head against his shins. “Not when there’s so much to do here. Starting with getting three hungry kitties breakfast!”

  He dressed and climbed down the ladder, emerging in the middle of the house’s main floor. Ahead of him, through a wide wall of glass blocks, lay the lawn and fountain, with the line of birches leading down to the sea. To the left was the Stonecutter trophy room, with its high ceiling, and next to that, a small, low-ceilinged bedroom overlooking the lawn. Behind him was the door to the back garden and a combination storeroom and workroom, with chests against one wall, and furnaces, crafting tables, and looms against the other, as well as a ladder leading down to the enchanting room, another storeroom, and the pool. To Stax’s right, past a cluster of couches and chairs, was another wall of glass framing a door leading out to the south lawn. Stax could just see the roof of the boathouse, tucked snugly against the hill and the sheep pen.

  As Stax prepared breakfast, Coal, Emerald, and Lapis all made their way down from the upstairs bedroom to twine themselves around his ankles, meowing as if on the verge of starvation. He prepared fish for them, sliced off a chunk of bread for himself, slathered it with honey, and ate it while inspecting the east lawn, then the south lawn, and then the back garden. All looked as it should, which was to say all looked the same as it had yesterday, and the week and month before that.

  Except.

  “Hmm, kitties, that isn’t right,” said Stax. He put the half-eaten chunk of bread down on a table in the back hall, below the frames holding a stone pickaxe and sword, and climbed up the ladder to the bedroom. Then he made his way out onto the balcony and stared out at the ridge.

  Birches crowned the top of the ridge, sprouted from the terraced slopes, and left much of the back garden in cool shadow. That was what Stax’s father had wanted—he’d liked the birches’ white trunks and narrow, bladelike dark green leaves, and had pointed out to Stax how their white bark marked with black whorls mimicked the diorite walls of the house, making the back garden and the lawn feel like a continuation of the Stonecutter home rather than something separate from it.

  But now Stax saw clearly what he thought he’d glimpsed downstairs. There was a different shade of green peeking out among the birch leaves atop the ridge, and below it, a hint of dark wood.

  “Now, how did I miss that?” he asked himself, having forgotten that Coal, Emerald, and Lapis were still downstairs, happily reducing their fish breakfast to bones. “An oak tree has grown up into the view. We can’t have that, now can we? What would Father say?”

  Stax stood on the balcony for some time, first considering the oak tree and then carefully scanning the ridge and the hills around the back garden, in case some other invader had escaped his attention. But all else was as it should be.

  “Well, that’s it, then,” Stax said. “We’ll have to revise the day’s to-do list.”

  But he didn’t head out to deal with the tree right then, or indeed for the next few hours. Instead he wandere
d the shore of the estate, taking a moment to peer out at the icebergs in the distance, and whacked away at stray tufts of long grass. He wondered if the flowers on the low hill would be more attractive if he mixed in some lilacs for more color. Or perhaps he should reshape the hill completely, making it symmetrical and creating terraces for planting.

  Stax decided reshaping the hill was too big a job for one day, particularly such a hot one, but promised himself that he’d consider the idea again in a few weeks. He checked in on the cows and the chickens, gathering milk and eggs for the larder, and finished his rounds by hopping the fence to stand amid the Stonecutter flock of sheep, which included white ones but also ones with red, yellow, blue, and orange wool. He must have left the door to the house open behind him, for while he was in the sheep pen the cats joined him and alternated between purring and mewling for attention.

  “I think we need a purple sheep,” Stax said, eyeing the red and blue sheep munching grass in the corner. “Don’t you think so, kitties? An estate needs a sheep of every color, after all.”

  Coal chose that moment to meow, and Stax shook his head.

  “Dye a white sheep purple? Well, we could do that, I suppose. But more proper to do it the natural way, don’t you think? Anyway, I’m not sure if we have any purple dye in the storeroom.”

  The more Stax thought about it, the more he was sure he was correct, and they had no purple dye. He knew he could find the recipe for purple dye in one of his father’s books in the enchanting room, down by the pool. That reminded him of a swim, which seemed like a pleasant activity to break up a hot afternoon; the sun was midway down the sky, but it was still uncomfortably humid, with no sign of rain. And looking at the sky reminded Stax, once again, of the oak tree that had grown up where it didn’t belong.