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Copyright © 2018 by Danica Davidson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Brian Peterson
Cover photo by Lordwhitebear
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5107-2852-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-2710-6
Printed in the United States of America
Table of contents
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 1
“I ’M WARNING YOU,” THE VILLAGER TOLD US. “IF YOU enter that jungle temple, you’ll never come out.”
I felt my stomach clench. I was out with Dad, my cousin Alex, and my Earth friends, Maison, Destiny, and Yancy, on our way to a jungle temple that held a very special crystal shard. We’d recently learned that the evil Ender Dragon was trying to escape the End, and the only way we could stop her was to track down crystal shards left by my ancestor, Steve Alexander, before the monsters working for her could find them.
Steve Alexander had left a special book to help us find the shards, so that’s how we knew one was supposed to be in the jungle temple. If we could find all the crystals, it would create the only weapon that could defeat the Ender Dragon. But even though the Ender Dragon was still in the End (for now), she had Endermen and other mobs searching the Overworld for the same crystal shards. If she got her claws on the shards before we did, we’d not only lose our only chance to fight her, but it would make her more powerful than ever.
So far we’d managed to find two crystals, and finding and protecting them had been a serious challenge. Since I’d never been to the jungle biome before, I was especially unsure of what to expect. Seeing my nervousness, Dad had stopped in the village at the edge of the jungle biome to ask some questions.
“I didn’t ask for a warning,” Dad said to the villager in a gruff voice. “I asked if we were headed in the right direction.”
Where I lived, everyone respected my dad because of his skills as a mob fighter and builder. But here, nobody knew him, and the villager was looking at Dad as if he were some kind of idiot.
“I can tell you’re not from around here,” the villager said. “That’s why I’m trying to warn you.”
“I’ve been to plenty of jungle temples,” Dad said. He sounded insulted that anyone would doubt him.
“Doesn’t matter,” the villager said quickly. “There’s jungle temples, and there’s that jungle temple.” He tilted his head in the direction we were going. “That one’s haunted.”
Maison, Destiny, and Yancy paled. Alex perked up. The more challenging the adventure, the happier Alex was. I felt more like Maison, Destiny, and Yancy did.
“That’s crazy,” Dad said. “Temples aren’t haunted.”
“Something terrible happened in that temple, centuries ago,” the villager said. “No one remembers exactly what, but we don’t have to. Go anywhere close to that temple and it’ll make your hair stand on end. Bad enchantments have cursed the place. Now they say armored ghosts prowl the halls like haunted guards. And if they find anyone skulking around, they take them directly to the dungeon.”
“Dungeon?” Yancy mouthed at us. He’d been trapped in a dungeon once before, and I didn’t think he wanted to return. He’d tried to stage a zombie takeover back in his days as a bully. But lately, Yancy was on the side of good.
“They say only one man has ever been able to escape from that dungeon,” the villager went on, eyeing Dad. “If you want to risk it yourself, I can’t stop you. But don’t drag kids into it. One grownup and five children? Besides, these three kids look sickly.”
He gave Maison, Destiny, and Yancy a once-over, clucking his tongue in sympathy and disgust. He didn’t realize they were from Earth. “Those guards’ll pick you off one at a time until no one is left.”
“I’ve heard enough,” Dad said, making a signal for us to follow him.
We did, though we couldn’t help looking over our shoulders, watching the villager as we got farther and farther away. He stood at the end of his village, shaking his head at us.
The village was quickly swallowed up behind us and we headed into the jungle proper. It was all so green, the trees lined with vines and the bushes covering the ground. Our passage was slow, because we had to climb on top of the vegetation or force our way through it.
“So, I’m going to go ahead and talk about the elephant in the room,” Yancy said.
“Elephant?” I said, startled, looking around. “I think we just have ocelots and parrots here.” I knew it was in a jungle biome that Dad had tamed an ocelot and turned her into our sweet cat, Ossie. Ossie was safe back at the house now, where my Aunt Alexandra was watching over the other crystal shards.
“It’s a figure of speech,” Yancy said. “We need to talk about the thing no one is talking about. See, I understand why we have to go to this temple to get the shard, but . . . what if that villager is right? Maybe we can just blow the whole temple up with TNT, and then look for the shard in the wreckage.”
Dad looked at Yancy dangerously. I had a feeling Dad was still in a bad mood from his conversation with the villager, and he didn’t want Yancy to remind him of it.
“TNT could destroy the crystal, and any other clues we might find there,” Dad said. “Besides, all jungle temples are more or less the same. They are all three stories tall. There are levers you can push to open a hidden trapdoor and get to a treasure chest. That chest is probably where the shard is, so we’ll look there first. All that talk about ‘armored ghosts’ is pure nonsense.”
I agreed with Dad on that one. I’d heard of and seen lots of crazy stuff, like talki
ng Withers and portals to Earth. I’d even turned into an Enderman for a while, despite how dangerous it was (turning into an Enderman had let the Ender Dragon into my head, and she’d never fully left). She still liked to torment me in my mind, trying to get under my skin. But I’d never even heard of actual ghosts in the Overworld—especially armored ones!
“Wouldn’t leaving the shard in the treasure chest be too obvious?” Yancy asked, but Dad silenced him with another look.
I’d been my dad’s son for eleven years, so I knew the simple rule that Yancy didn’t: don’t question Dad, and things are a lot easier!
However, I was thinking the same as Yancy. Maybe normally the treasure was kept there, but if we could get the shard that easily, that meant the Ender Dragon’s minions would be able to find it just as easily. Didn’t it?
“What’s that?” Maison asked, pointing ahead of us.
So far all we’d seen after leaving the village was jungle, jungle, jungle. Not a hint of humanity. But there was something white up ahead, and it was obvious next to all the green. It looked like . . . a sign?
The sign was partly covered by vines and leaves. Alex reached it first and wiped the green away with her hand.
GO NO FARTHER, the sign said. THE HAUNTED TEMPLE AWAITS.
CHAPTER 2
UNDERNEATH THE WRITING WAS A DRAWING OF several armored skeletons. But skeletons were all over the Overworld, so that didn’t seem like a sign that the temple was haunted.
Then Maison said, “There’s something on the other side.”
Alex walked around to the back of the sign.
“What does it say?” I demanded. Everyone was crowded around so much that we were smooshing one another and I couldn’t see.
“It . . . doesn’t say anything,” Alex said. “It just has a picture of a dragon.”
The Ender Dragon! I was sure of it. But when I pushed through to see it, I saw a picture of a dragon with a little man riding on it. I was expecting an evil looking dragon with claws and fangs and an appetite for destruction. The armored skeletons on the other side looked way scarier than this dragon!
“The dragon picture looks much older than the skeleton picture,” Dad said. “You can tell by how faded it is. It’s like someone found an old sign and wrote their warning on the back.” He shrugged and kept walking, even though the rest of us were still clustered around the sign.
“What do you think it means?” Maison said.
“I bet we find lots of clues at the temple,” Alex said.
I tucked the sign into my toolkit so we’d have it for later. It might give us important information.
“Come on, kids,” Dad called out. “I’ve timed this so we should reach the temple long before dark. We want to try to get in, out, and back to the village while we still have sunlight.”
This was a good idea. Even though I was nervous about going to a possibly haunted temple, I felt safer journeying with my friends, especially with Dad and Alex. Maison, Destiny, and Yancy all played the game Minecraft and were good at it, and Alex and Dad had actually been to jungle biomes before and were great warriors. Alex was a master with her bow and arrows, and Dad had his diamond sword.
“Hey, look!” Yancy squealed. A navy blue parrot was flying overhead, beating its wings.
“Leave it, Yancy,” I said. I was with Dad; we needed to stop dillydallying and get this done before dark. Alex gave Yancy a look that said the same thing.
“No, I want a pet parrot,” Yancy said. “There’s nothing like taming a bird to make you feel a little less . . . you know . . . terrified about going into a haunted temple. And I can teach it to say things and have it dance to jukebox music.”
Then Yancy pulled something out of his backpack and began waving it around, going, “Here, Polly, Polly! Polly want a cookie? Polly want an Oreo?”
“Yancy,” Destiny scolded lightly. She was his cousin and sometimes acted like the boss when Yancy was being weird. Which was often, because Yancy was Yancy. “Don’t feed parrots cookies from our world.”
“Why not?” Yancy said. “You can’t feed parrots in our world chocolate, because it’ll make them sick. That’s why the programmers of Minecraft changed the game so you can only feed parrots seed, not cookies like you used to be able to. But now that I’m here in the real Overworld, I want to see what happens. Ah ha!”
Just then the navy blue parrot flew down to Yancy’s eye level and took the Oreo, or whatever it was, eating it so fast that crumbs sprayed everywhere. Big hearts showed up around the parrot, showing that it loved Yancy now and it was tame. And it definitely didn’t get sick, so it must not have been like parrots in Yancy’s world.
“All right!” Yancy cheered as the bird perched on his left shoulder. He gave it another cookie, then wiped off the cookie crumbs that had fallen onto his shirt. “Look, Destiny, I have a parrot on my shoulder. Don’t I look like a pirate?”
“You look like an idiot,” Alex muttered under her breath.
“Hey, parrot,” Yancy said. “Can you say, ‘Alex is a party pooper?’”
The parrot didn’t try. He was trying to nudge his way into Yancy’s backpack for more cookies.
“He is pretty cute,” Destiny allowed after a moment. She reached out and stroked the bird’s feathers. “You guys have some of the same types of parrots in Minecraft that we do on Earth. On Earth, this would be called a hyacinth macaw.”
I hadn’t known that, and I thought it was pretty interesting. I reached out to pet the bird.
“We’ll call him Hyacinth, then,” Yancy said.
“I’ll never remember that,” Alex complained.
“All right, we’ll call him Blue,” Yancy said, petting Blue on the head. “Nice and easy. Blue, we’re looking for hidden treasure, just like the pirates of old stories.”
I looked at Dad, wondering what he thought about all this bird business. But he wasn’t really paying attention to us. Instead, he kept looking up, as if he expected something to jump down from the trees and attack us.
One thing that was nice about the jungle biome was that it didn’t have special monsters in it. It had monsters—also called mobs—like zombies, creepers, and skeletons, but I could just as easily run into those at home. The only creatures that were specific to the jungle biome were parrots and ocelots, which didn’t attack people.
I didn’t think any of the bad mobs could get up into trees, but I looked up too. I didn’t see anything scary. There were a lot of cocoa pods, though I wasn’t going to tell Yancy that. Earlier he said he wanted to cut some cocoa pods in half and see if they made the sound of horse hooves like coconuts on Earth did. In the background, I heard Yancy trying to get Blue to say, “Argh, matey.” Probably another Earth reference. Sometimes it felt like he never took anything seriously.
“This isn’t right,” I heard Dad whisper under his breath, as if he were talking to himself. Then he glanced back and saw me watching him. He shook his head and kept walking.
For a while we headed on through the jungle, with Dad striding ahead and the others cooing over Blue in the back. Yancy kept trying to get him to say things he thought were funny and Destiny told him were actually mean. Yancy replied that Blue had a sense of humor and knew where he was coming from.
I was half listening to all this, but mostly I was watching Dad’s back. The way he was walking told me something was wrong, but he still wasn’t saying what. Then he looked back up at the trees and said, “I knew it.”
Everyone stopped.
“Is something in the trees, Uncle Steve?” Alex asked. We all looked up. Blue’s head followed Yancy’s gaze up too.
“No, not the trees,” Dad said. “Look at the sky!”
It was hard at first, because so much of the sky was blocked by all the treetops. But I could see bits of a hazy, grayish sky. At first it didn’t mean anything to me. Then I realized something.
The grayish color meant night was coming. It was darker in the jungle thanks to all the trees, so only Dad had realized
that the light even above the treeline was off.
“That’s not right!” Alex exclaimed. “We should have lots of time before dark!”
“Is this part of the temple being haunted?” Destiny asked, sounding scared. “Is this whole jungle haunted?”
We all looked at Dad. He was frowning angrily at the sky. I saw him clutch his diamond sword even tighter.
“Let’s not take any chances,” Dad finally said. “We’ll run the rest of the way.”
But it wasn’t easy to run in the jungle. Trees and vines and thick bushes slowed us down. We soon found the most we could do was jog, and even that left us out of breath.
Now that Dad had pointed it out, I couldn’t stop noticing that there wasn’t enough light in the jungle. And the amount of light was rapidly dropping. I remembered something Steve Alexander had written in his book about the Ender Dragon: As her power grew, she was able to change our very world. Night grew longer, giving her mobs more time to attack villagers and wreak havoc.
So, in other words, the days got shorter?
Whether we were in a haunted jungle or the Ender Dragon was changing daylight hours, one thing was certain: as soon as it got dark, all the dangerous mobs would come out.
We weren’t going to make it to the jungle temple and back before nightfall.
CHAPTER 3
PRETTY SOON, THE NIGHT WAS CLOSING AROUND us like a fist. We were still struggling through the foliage, our legs getting caught in vines. And there was no sign of the jungle temple!
“It can’t be much farther,” Dad was saying, hoisting himself over another bush.
“Shhh!” Maison said urgently.
We all froze. Even Dad froze, though he never took orders.
Maison was pointing.
We all followed the direction of her finger with our eyes, and our breaths hitched. Through all the trees, we noticed an Enderman shuffling through the jungle. It was far enough away that it hadn’t noticed us yet. Normally Endermen were docile mobs that left us alone as long as we didn’t look them directly in the eye. But now that they were working for the Ender Dragon, they would attack us on the spot.
Danger in the Jungle Temple Page 1
