“I just see a black screen,” Steve Alexander said.
“Well, it isn’t working now,” Yancy admitted, embarrassed and drooping. “But if we were on Earth, I could show you all sorts of things!”
“Does your phone have the power to stop a dragon?” Steve Alexander asked. “Does it put food on your table? Does it make you a better person?”
“Well … uh,” was all Yancy could say.
“Then it is of no use to us now,” Steve Alexander said, handing the phone back.
“I guess it’s all about how you decide to use it,” Yancy said. Then he added under his breath, “When it has reception.”
“Maya did not have all these inventions,” Steve Alexander said. “She had what she needed: smarts and bravery.”
“We have that too,” Destiny said, sounding a little hurt. “We’ve defeated lots of mobs.”
“We need a way to get to the other islands,” Steve Alexander said, looking back out at the void.
“You can fix those wings with an anvil and some leather,” Yancy said, eyeing the ruffled feathers running down Steve Alexander’s back. “Then you can fly.”
“And leave you behind?” Steve Alexander said. “No, we need all of us for this. What we need is another ship, and you can find them on some of these End islands. The ship will allow us to cross the void.”
“Aye, aye!” Yancy said. I didn’t want to tell Yancy this, but I thought Steve Alexander had a point that phones weren’t the fix-it-alls Earth people made them out to be. When I was on Earth, I thought a lot of people were too attached to their phones. They said it helped them connect to other people, which I thought was neat. But if they used it in place of seeing people face to face, I thought it more did the opposite a lot of the time.
Everyone spread out on the foggy island, looking for a hidden ship. Everyone except for Steve Alexander and me. He was still looking out over the void like looking out at sea, and he had a wistful, sad expression on his face. What was he thinking? I decided I better say something.
“We’re really glad you’re here,” I started. “You were always so helpful when you’d give me clues on my missions.” I decided not to point out that he often didn’t give me clues and left me to figure things out on my own. When he’d done that, I’d usually complained about it at the time. But afterward I kept feeling as if I had grown from the experience, even though I hated the experience whenever I was going through it.
Steve Alexander turned back from the void and looked at me. The wind kept moving the feathers on his back, making them almost look like an old cape that’d grown tattered and worn.
Now that we were alone again and he was looking at me, I started to feel self-conscious and embarrassed. The fact he wasn’t talking didn’t help any. It just made me want to talk more to fill in the silence. But the more I talked, the dumber I began to feel.
“I’ve looked up to you since I was little,” I said. “My dad always told me we were related to you, and I didn’t believe him until recently. Now I know the truth. I think what you did to help the Overworld is really, really amazing.”
I wanted to wince at myself. Now Steve Alexander was staring at me as if he didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought people were supposed to like hearing praise about themselves. I knew I always liked it when people said good things about me.
So I quickly added, “You’re my hero.”
He cringed. Why did he cringe? My mouth went dry.
Then he said, “Look, Stevie, part of growing up is facing new things. I’m not your hero or anyone else’s.”
“Wh-what do you mean?” I faltered.
“People get called ‘heroes’ one day, and something else the next. No person can fit the bill of a perfect ‘hero’ because no person is that good. The idea of a hero is a dangerous one. I used to think Jean was my hero, because she saved me from my loneliness and then rode into battle with me each night to fight the mobs. The people of the world were cruel, but Jean was just. Think what a lesson I had to learn when I realized Jean had never been a hero.”
“That’s just one example!” I said. “And even if you’re not perfect, you’re good!”
Even as he said it, I hated to say I saw the points he was making. Sometimes people had called me a hero for saving the Overworld. Part of me really loved hearing that, and part of me didn’t feel comfortable with it. Why? Because I knew what I was like. I was a kid who fell off pigs while riding them or got annoyed with Dad or forgot something I was supposed to do. Those didn’t sound like things heroes did. So when people called me a hero, it felt like they believed in a perfect side of me that didn’t exist, and it would only be so long before they saw the real Stevie, the Stevie who often fell short.
“I do good actions when I can,” Steve Alexander said. “I think that’s just called behaving decently. I don’t call that being a hero.”
I thought back on the villagers who’d given over to the Ender Dragon instead of fighting. They hadn’t tried to do a good action … but was that just because they didn’t have the choice? Or they felt they didn’t have the choice? The blacksmith and librarian had made it out of the village without turning, so there were possible escapes that I guessed other people hadn’t considered.
“No one else stood up to the Ender Dragon when she rose to power in the past,” I pointed out. “Only you did.”
“That’s not being a hero, Stevie,” he said. “I think it more says something about how much people will avoid anything unpleasant unless they have to.”
He started to turn away, to leave me with my thoughts.
“Wait,” I called out.
He stopped and turned back. “What is it?”
“Why do you still call her Jean?” I asked. “She calls herself the Ender Dragon. That’s what we all call her. She hasn’t been Jean since …”
I stopped. This time when there was silence, I didn’t feel a need to fill it. Because even though he didn’t say a word to me, I thought I saw the answer in his eyes. He called her Jean because a part of him couldn’t let go of the friend he’d had. A part of him still wanted desperately for her to be Jean, somewhere inside of her.
And then Steve Alexander turned and walked into the purple fog, joining the others in the search for the ship. The only sound was the wind.
That’s the danger in believing in heroes, little one. You will always be disappointed by a so-called hero’s reality.
The memory of the Ender Dragon’s words rang in my mind. Thousands of years had let us build Steve Alexander up in our minds without ever knowing the man. Here I’d thought that once we’d released him, he would have immediately taken charge. I could take a back seat to him and not feel scared, and with his leadership we’d quickly take out the Ender Dragon and get Maison back to safety.
And what were we? The Overworld Heroes task force? That felt like such a joke right now.
Maison, we’re coming for you, I thought. Even if we can’t count on Steve Alexander like I thought we could.
If he refused to see how great he could be, I could still rise above that. I would stop looking for confidence in Steve Alexander and find it elsewhere. Maison’s life and the lives of everyone in the Overworld depended on it.
I started to walk through the fog, looking for any signs of a ship. Even as I looked, I couldn’t get Steve Alexander’s face or voice out of my mind.
My first thought, when I’d seen him stumble out of the cell, had been right. The Steve Alexander of legend was the hero we could all relate to. And the Steve Alexander of reality was a shaken, worn-out man. He was a man who had lost his best friend, had suffered the worst betrayal, and had been locked away. A man whose only possession was a broken pair of wings that could no longer fly.
CHAPTER 8
An excited yell ripped me out of my thoughts.
“A ship! A ship!” Yancy was shouting. “I found us a ship!”
I ran toward his voice, passing by more mysterious purple buildings. The towers jutte
d out of the fog like the moon appearing from out of the clouds. Banners fluttered on top of buildings. Nothing about this landscape felt quite real. And when I skittered over to where Yancy was standing, the ship just made it all more dreamlike.
I’d gone boating with Dad plenty of times. We always made the boats ourselves out of wood and they would fit a few people at most.
By comparison, this ship could have probably held a hundred people comfortably. Maybe more. It had a long deck, a little cabin in the middle you could walk into, and a tall line for a mast. There was even a crow’s hatch you could get to if you walked up some stairs. I didn’t know the names for all the parts of a ship, but I recognized this type of ship as one they also have on Earth. Or had. Maison had shown me pictures of ships like this, and she said they were used a few hundred years ago.
I was the first to reach Yancy, who was beaming in pride over the ship. A moment later Alex arrived and she let out a whoop.
“It’s huge!” she said. “Now that’s the way to travel!”
Dad and Maison’s mom joined us right then, followed by Destiny a few seconds later.
“That’s not even the best part,” Yancy said, still beaming. “Look at it! Don’t you know what it looks like?”
We all stared at him blankly.
Yancy was so excited he could barely contain it. “It looks like a pirate ship! An old-timey pirate ship for the pirates in old books!”
We all stared blankly at him. Then I understood and groaned. That Yancy! Even when things were at their worst he could find something amusing to him. (It usually wasn’t so amusing to the rest of us.) And ever since he tamed his parrot Blue he’d been going on about pirate this and pirate that. “Don’t I look like a pirate?” he’d say, pointing to the bird on his shoulder. Or, “Argh, matey, we’re here to look for treasure!” while we were getting ready for another crystal mission. Everyone except Yancy thought the whole pirate thing had gotten old.
“How do we get onboard?” I asked. Yancy frowned. I knew he’d wanted me to say something about pirates, but I wanted to get down to business!
You see, there was something different about this ship, and I don’t just mean its size or its purple color. It was floating off the ground, out of our reach. We couldn’t climb up to it, and we couldn’t jump to it, either. I didn’t know what was keeping it afloat, so I guessed it was enchantments from the End.
Steve Alexander stepped out of the fog, surveying the ship. “Good job!” he told Yancy. “Now I …” His hand went to where he used to keep his toolkit. Of course there wasn’t anything there, and that made his face cloud over.
“Normally I would teleport there using an Ender pearl,” he said. “Unfortunately …”
“No problem!” Alex said. “We can build a bridge there using end stone bricks!”
“Good thinking,” Steve Alexander said.
There were plenty of end stone bricks around, and we all grabbed them and built ourselves a little bridge up into the ship. With the whole group of us working, it didn’t take long. I tried not to look down.
“Last one in is a rotten egg!” Alex called. She hopped onto the deck while the rest of us followed, then quickly moved around, exploring it.
And she wasn’t the only one excited to be onboard. “Shiver me timbers!” Yancy crowed when he got on the deck. “This here be a fine pirate ship!”
I didn’t understand half of that. Blue chirped happily.
“Look at the front of the ship!” Alex called gleefully, peering over the edge.
“I’ve heard of pirate ships having mermaid figureheads at the bows,” Destiny said, setting Ossie safely down on the deck. Ossie began to sniff and check out her surroundings. “Not dragons.”
Dragons? I peeked over the front end of the ship. At first all I saw was the empty, dizzy drop below, where a person could fall and fall and fall and never stop falling. That made me not want to lean too far over it. I pulled back a little, so that only the top of my head was peeking over. I looked down and saw the snarling face of a dragon!
I leapt back to safety, heart pounding. Laughter rang out behind me, and it was from Alex.
“Relax, Stevie,” she said. “It’s not real. In fact …”
Before I could tell her she was crazy, Alex jumped over the front of the ship.
“Alex, no!” I cried, getting back up. I peeked over the front edge of the ship again. Alex was holding on to the ship, balancing herself to get the dragon head. She took blocks out of her toolkit to brace around the head, allowing her to get it. The face kept snarling at her as if it would bite, but she was correct: it wasn’t real.
“Got it!” Alex said, waving the dragon head around before dropping it triumphantly in her toolkit. “I wonder what I can make using this.”
“Alex, this isn’t the time,” Dad shouted down to her, frowning.
“But Uncle Steve!” Alex replied. “How often do you get to take home a dragon head? Hopefully we’ll get two today, if you know what I mean!”
Steve Alexander was nearby and he made a disgusted sound, like he didn’t care for what Alex said. I wanted to say something, but he had already turned away, his winged back to me. I wondered why he didn’t just get rid of those wings if they weren’t working.
Wait a second. I thought back. Didn’t he say he found those wings in a ship? Did that mean this ship might also have its own pair of wings?
Leaving Dad and Alex to argue in the background, I headed toward the little cabin below deck. There was an opening that led down there, and a little set of stairs. In the cabin I saw a brewing stand with two potions on it. I picked the potions up to investigate. They were both Potions of Healing, which could come in useful.
There was another stairway going farther down into the belly of the ship. No one else had followed me, and I could hear them all making a fuss onboard. Alex was still defending her dragon head, Dad was telling her we had to get to business, and Yancy was trying to get Blue to say, “Shiver me timbers!” Whatever that meant. I wondered what Steve Alexander thought of us. He probably wasn’t all that impressed.
Down the stairway I went, into the last room. This room was much longer than the last room, though it wasn’t very wide. In the far corner I saw two chests between a purple block and … and …
A pair of gray wings hanging on the wall.
I couldn’t believe my luck! I went straight for the pair of wings, not even thinking about what great treasures might be hidden in the chests. After seeing Steve Alexander’s tattered wings, this pair looked so pure and perfect, never used.
But as soon as I stepped forward and reached out, the purple block split in two and a monster was after me.
CHAPTER 9
I never saw it coming! One second it was just another purple block, like a million other purple blocks I’d seen in the End city. Then it split down the middle and a face was staring at me from inside it, like the center of a seashell. It was just a square little floating head, with two eyes and a mouth—it looked pretty harmless. It could be a pet or an animal to keep on a farm. Then it opened its mouth and shot a jagged projectile at me.
I jumped to the side, trying to dodge it! At the same time, I automatically slashed out at the creature with my diamond sword. It was instinct. But the shell shut, making it look like a regular block again. That wasn’t even the worst part. The projectile followed me, going off its path to make sure it hit!
I grunted from the brunt of it, then felt my feet lift off the ground. Wait, what was happening? I didn’t have the wings, so why was I flying?
Actually, flying wasn’t the right word. I was floating, and it wasn’t my choice. Something in the projectile had done this!
“Help!” I called. “Help!”
As if it heard me, the purple block popped back open and the little square creature shot another projectile my way. I tried to stop it with my sword and couldn’t. The projectile crashed into me, and then I floated farther up into the air. I hit against the ceiling, floating
there like a ghost!
“HELLLPPP!” I shouted, louder. I tried to move and it was like awkwardly swimming through air. The whole back part of me was sticking against the ceiling.
All the fussy voices upstairs stopped bickering and I heard their footsteps as everyone ran down below. Steve Alexander and Wolf were the first to make it. Wolf came barreling across the room, and when the creature opened its shell to blast me again, the dog pounced on it and took it out. The creature was gone, but I was still floating against the ceiling!
Dad came into the room, did a quick look around, then spied me. “Stevie!” he hollered. “Stop playing around! First Alex and now you!”
Alex, Yancy, Destiny, and Maison’s mom were down there next. Ossie peeked her head through Destiny’s legs, wanting to see what the commotion was about.
“Whoa!” Alex said, thrilled. “How’d you do that, Stevie? I want to do it too!”
“I can’t get down,” I told Dad, really embarrassed. I found I could kind of slide around on the ceiling, and that was it.
“What did you touch?” Dad asked suspiciously.
“I know what happened here,” Steve Alexander said, looking unfazed. “Stevie met a shulker, a little mob that hides in purple blocks and shoots projectiles. You just find them in End cities, and they put the Levitation effect on you.”
“Is it awesome up there, Stevie?” Alex called up.
I wouldn’t say it was awesome. I really wanted back down! Not having control over gravity was freaking me out.
“It’s easily fixed,” Steve Alexander said, still calm. “I’ve dealt with a few of them myself. Just give him some milk to drink.”
Dad reached into his toolkit and tossed me up a glass of milk. “We shouldn’t have to waste milk on things like this!” he told me. In the Overworld, milk healed us and we only had so much on hand, so I knew we had to be careful.
Return of the Ender Dragon Page 3
