The Last of the Ender Crystal

by Danica Davidson

  This book is not authorized or sponsored by Microsoft Corp., Mojang AB, Notch Development AB or Scholastic Inc., or any other person or entity owning or controlling rights in the Minecraft name, trademark, or copyrights.

  Copyright © 2018 by Danica Davidson

  Minecraft® is a registered trademark of Notch Development AB.

  The Minecraft game is copyright © Mojang AB.

  This book is not authorized or sponsored by Microsoft Corp., Mojang AB, Notch Development AB or Scholastic Inc., or any other person or entity owning or controlling rights in the Minecraft name, trademark, or copyrights.

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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: 978-1-5107-3352-7

  Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5107-3351-0

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3353-4

  Printed in Canada

  CHAPTER 1

  The ender dragon was about to escape from her prison. I could feel it all the way down to my bones, like a cold wind. The monsters in the land had been growing stronger for weeks, and the nights had gotten so long we barely saw the sun anymore.

  Then there was her voice: it kept taunting me, inside my head, promising to do evil deeds if I didn’t bow to her. The Overworld’s only hope was to find the last crystal shard that my ancestor Steve Alexander had hidden. With it, we could create the ultimate weapon to defeat her.

  But we had hit a dead end.

  “Read it again,” my cousin Alex demanded.

  I sighed and read the newest passage we’d decoded in Steve Alexander’s enchanted book. We’d already read it a dozen times. After each new crystal we found, the enchantment in the book let us read a little more of the text—but this clue was way too vague. So far Steve Alexander had also been giving us maps in the book to find the next crystal, but we’d gotten no map with this one. And time was running out!

  “For its safety, the final crystal shard has been taken from this world and given to Maya,” I read. “Seek out the earth woman. Alex, that’s all it says.”

  “This is just great,” muttered Yancy sarcastically, raking his hand through his dark hair. “We have no map, and apparently this crystal is floating around somewhere on Earth. A tiny little planet which, according to the Internet, has a radius of a mere 3,959 miles. You know, just a quick stroll.”

  “It’s almost like Steve Alexander doesn’t want us to find the last crystal shard,” murmured Destiny, nervously biting at her fingernails.

  “I don’t think that’s it,” Maison argued. She was my best friend, and the first person I had met from Earth. Right now we were all sitting in her bedroom, near her computer, which acted as her portal to the Overworld. Or “Minecraft,” as people on Earth called it. “Whenever Steve Alexander gets vague about things, he usually wants us to dig deeper.”

  “Yeah, and I’m digging,” Yancy said, clicking on his phone. Blue, the pet parrot he had tamed in the jungle biome, was perched on Yancy’s shoulder, happily chirping. At least that bird was unaware of the stress the rest of us were feeling.

  “If we can’t track down the crystal, you’d think we’d at least be able to track down Maya, the Earth woman who helped Steve Alexander imprison the Ender Dragon in the first place,” he went on. “But you know what the problem is with that? Well, there’s the fact that she apparently lived thousands of years ago, before most human cultures had writing systems. Second, when I Googled the name ‘Maya,’ I got about a million hits. It showed up in all sorts of ancient cultures, not to mention modern ones, so we can’t even narrow down where she might have lived. That’s not even counting all the cultures that have disappeared over time, so we don’t even have records of the names they used.”

  I’d never thought of cultures disappearing. Was that like how we’d find old, forgotten temples in the Overworld and have no idea who’d made them? It hadn’t occurred to me that Earth might have that, too.

  “What does all that mean?” I asked.

  “It means,” Yancy said, “that Steve Alexander is no help on this one. We’re down to the last crystal shard, and he’s bailed on us. And after all that talk about being a hero. What a loser.”

  Alex jumped up, furious. “Steve Alexander is the greatest hero the Overworld has ever seen, and he’s our great-great-great-whatever grandfather! Don’t you be talking about him like that!”

  “Fine,” Yancy said, tossing his cell phone to Alex. “Then you find the crystal shard, and Maya.”

  Alex frowned. “I don’t know how to use this contraption!”

  Alex and I were from the Overworld, while Maison, Destiny, and Yancy all came from Earth. Alex and I knew how to make our own food and build our own homes and create our own weapons. Maison, Destiny, and Yancy knew how to use cell phones and computers and the Internet. We came from very different worlds, but we were still friends.

  We were also all part of the Overworld Heroes task force, which had been created by my aunt, Mayor Alexandra. It was supposed to be our mission to stop the Ender Dragon from escaping from the End. The dragon had been threatening to escape for a while, and if she did, her first mission would be to take over the Overworld and go after Steve Alexander’s descendants. That meant Alex, Aunt Alexandra, Dad, and me. She hated Steve Alexander for locking her in the End thousands of years ago, and she’d been biding her time, waiting for revenge, ever since.

  I ran the crystal over the book’s pages. Normally using the newest crystal shard would light up more words so we could read farther. But all these pages were blank. And they stayed blank, crystal or no crystal.

  “I think we’ll probably have better luck using the original tools Steve Alexander gave us, instead of using the Internet,” Maison said quietly. She had been acting really thoughtful while the rest of us were panicking. “They wouldn’t have had the Internet back then, so he and Maya wouldn’t have put clues there.”

  “See? This thing has no answers.” Alex threw the phone back at Yancy, and he caught it as it struck him in the chest. “You people on Earth have all these things that are supposed to make your lives easier,” Alex said, “but they don’t answer the hard questions!”

  “Hey, at least we live in a world that isn’t overrun with monsters every night,” Yancy shot back. Unlike Earth, darkness in the Overworld brought with it an onslaught of zombies; giant, red-eyed spiders; armed skeletons; creepers; and other monsters we called “mobs.” Yancy continued, “Maybe if you had more technology, you would have figured out how to get rid of them by now.”

  Alex’s face turned so red it looked like she was about to spit lava. When she opened her mouth to yell something at Yancy, I turned away and tried to clear my thoughts. I knew they
were only fighting because they were stressed, but it wasn’t going to do any good. Destiny looked miserable and hopeless, while Maison was staring out the window at the cold, rainy day, her mind clearly far away. I went to sit next to Maison.

  While Yancy and Alex were arguing, I kept remembering what Yancy had said about Steve Alexander: What a loser.

  Was he right? Everyone in the Overworld honored Steve Alexander’s name, but when you looked at Steve Alexander’s own writing, it often sounded like he didn’t think he was so heroic. And the Ender Dragon kept hinting that the Steve Alexander we thought we knew wasn’t the real Steve Alexander. Then again, she was always lying and manipulating and trying to destroy worlds. Steve Alexander wanted to save worlds.

  Except now he’d left us stranded. It wasn’t fair. Why would he even give us such a weak clue?

  “What do you think?” I asked Maison.

  “Maya can’t be alive anymore, so it’s not like we can seek her out,” Maison said. “And that must be who he means by ‘the Earth woman.’” She thought for another moment. “Unless …”

  That “unless” was enough to get my heart pounding. Right then, any idea was enough to get my heart pounding.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a screaming sound.

  CHAPTER 2

  Maison grabbed her phone and answered it, cutting off the shrill noise. It had still made me jump out of my skin. Earth’s technology was always making different sounds. In the Overworld, only living things made noises, so if you heard a sound, you knew immediately that a friend or foe was right by you. Earth was so noisy I didn’t know how the people who lived there full-time could stand it.

  “Hello?” Maison said, distracted. Yancy and Alex had both stopped arguing for Maison’s sake, though Yancy was eyeing Alex with annoyance and Alex was glaring at him.

  “Oh, hi, Grandma,” Maison said. “Yeah, I’m fine, just busy … Yeah, I really can’t talk right now … I’ll call you back … What’s that? Oh, thanks. No, I didn’t get your birthday package yet … Yeah, I know turning twelve is a big deal … What do you mean, especially in our family? … It’s a surprise? Okay, okay, Grandma, we’ll talk more soon. Love you. Bye.”

  She hung up, looking a little guilty for rushing her grandma off the phone.

  “I forgot your birthday was coming up!” Destiny said. She stopped biting her fingernails for a moment, as though glad to be distracted by something in the real world. “It’s this Saturday, right? Are you having a party?”

  My mind had been completely elsewhere, too. “It’s your birthday?” I said, stunned. It was still a few months before I turned twelve, and Maison had never mentioned her birthday. I didn’t want to admit it, but I felt kind of hurt. I thought best friends told each other everything. Were there other things I didn’t know about Maison?

  “Yeah, it’s my birthday this Saturday,” Maison said. “But it’s not a big deal. This is more important now. I was going to plan a party, except …”

  “We’ll have a big party after we defeat the Ender Dragon!” Destiny promised. Blue whistled excitedly. Destiny sounded eager to talk about something besides the dragon. But Maison was right; we needed to think about the next crystal.

  Still, a voice in the back of my head wondered what I should give Maison for her birthday. On Earth people usually bought gifts, but I wanted to make her something, so she’d know it was special.

  Trying to get over the fact that Maison hadn’t told me this important thing about her life, I asked, “But what were you starting to say before the phone rang? ‘Unless’ … ?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” Maison said. “I just noticed Maya is named in the first sentence, and in the second sentence it says ‘Earth woman.’ Maybe that ‘Earth woman’ isn’t Maya.”

  “Who else would it be?” Yancy demanded. “If it’s every Earth woman, that would be too easy. And he says ‘woman,’ not ‘women.’ I think there’s only one person who can help us.”

  I figured Yancy was probably right. Destiny said, “I still think it’s worth a try.” She gently took the book from me and moved the crystal over it.

  “Nothing,” Yancy grunted darkly. “Just like I expected.”

  “Let me try,” Maison said, reaching out.

  Yancy rolled his eyes and turned away. “I think we’re just wasting time here,” he mumbled, crossing his arms.

  But he turned back around when he heard a gasp.

  As Maison moved the crystal over the next blank page, something began to happen. A purple glow came out of the paper, lighting up the whole room. The violet tint fell all over our shocked faces as we huddled close to see what was going on. No words were coming out of the book, and no map either. No, this was different. A picture was forming on the page.

  “It’s Steve Alexander,” I whispered, hardly daring to breathe. Under the crystal in Maison’s hand, Steve Alexander’s features became clearer and clearer. His legs were spread as if he were riding a horse, and he was holding his diamond sword up. His mouth was open as if shouting a battle cry. He looked totally in his element, strong and determined. This man was no loser, I wanted to tell Yancy.

  The details of the picture continued to fill in, like spilled ink slowly making its way to the edges of the illustration. He was definitely riding some sort of animal, but as the picture emerged, I saw the animal was way too big to be a horse. I was confused. I remembered Steve Alexander writing about riding his steed into battle, and I knew “steed” was a fancy word for horse. Then some words spread across the page—a caption reading STEVE ALEXANDER AND HIS BELOVED STEED. So that had to be it.

  But when the picture was finished and the details were done shifting, I felt my heart almost stop for a moment. I started to tremble. Everything I knew about the Overworld, everything I believed about Steve Alexander and the Ender Dragon—it all went out the window when I saw that drawing.

  “No,” I said, feeling all the blood drain from my face. “No, this can’t be right! Please tell me this isn’t right!” We had been lied to—for thousands and thousands of years, we had been fed nothing but myths!

  CHAPTER 3

  “Stevie, get ahold of yourself,” yancy said, putting a steadying hand on my shoulder. I shook him off, unable to look away from the image.

  “But look at it!” I said shrilly. “Look!”

  It was an image of Steve Alexander.

  Riding the Ender Dragon.

  His steed!

  “That’s not right,” I said. “They’re mortal enemies. Steve Alexander is good and the Ender Dragon is evil. How could they … how—” I couldn’t finish out loud, but my brain was going into overdrive. How could Steve Alexander and the Ender Dragon have worked together? Who was really good, and who was really evil?

  The Ender Dragon had said, again and again, there was much I didn’t know about Steve Alexander. She kept telling me to join her.

  Was her side actually the side of good? Is that what the drawing meant?

  No, no. Her side wanted to destroy the Overworld!

  So if Steve Alexander had once worked with her, did that mean … he was evil too? Had this whole treacherous journey to find the Ender crystal shards meant nothing? Had everything Steve Alexander had written been a lie?

  I sank to my knees. I had never felt so betrayed in my life. Because if Steve Alexander was evil, then all the legends about him were lies. All the statues were meaningless. Was the sky made of ground and the ground made of sky? If I couldn’t believe this, what could I believe anymore?

  “I’m with Stevie!” Alex said, wiping her hand over the page frantically as if to blot it out. “This can’t be right!”

  Maison and Destiny stared, openmouthed, at the page, as though transfixed. Yancy looked grim, as if he didn’t like what he saw, but he accepted it. As if he’d accepted a lot of disappointment in his life and was more used to it than the rest of us. He’d lived a few years longer than us—as life went on, did you learn more and more terrible things about it?

&n
bsp; “If it’s in the book, it must be real,” Yancy said quietly.

  “There has to be an explanation for it,” Maison said. She turned to the next page and ran the crystal across it frantically, trying to unlock something, anything.

  “I get it now,” I said miserably, pulling myself back up to my feet. “Remember how we couldn’t figure out if the jungle temple we went to had belonged to Steve Alexander or the Ender Dragon? That’s because it belonged to both of them. That’s why we saw the claw marks and the S-A symbols for Steve Alexander. That’s why we saw a picture of a dragon on the sign out front.”

  “That doesn’t explain why there was a cell for Steve Alexander in the dungeon,” Destiny pointed out.

  My heart flip-flopped. She was right—that part still didn’t make sense, and I wanted to believe in Steve Alexander. But now a terrible thought came into my head: How could I believe in someone I’d never even met?

  You did meet him, I told himself. Well, not exactly. I’d heard his voice a few times. Still, it had been a good, helpful voice.

  Just then I heard the voice again, as though I’d willed it into being. I know what you must be thinking, Steve Alexander’s voice said.

  Alex’s head popped up. “Who’s talking?”

  “You mean you can hear him too?” I exclaimed. In the past, only I’d been able to hear Steve Alexander’s voice, in my head. But everyone seemed to be alert and looking around.

  This is my greatest shame, Steve Alexander’s voice went on.

  “His voice is coming from the book!” Maison cried. “The crystal must have triggered it.”

  If enough years have passed, maybe people have forgotten how I unleashed the Ender Dragon, his voice continued. However, I will never forget. If you have retrieved this many shards of the crystal, you must be truly good, honest people, and hard workers. I asked my companion Maya to hide the crystals well, and I helped her enchant this book so that you would truly be able to see what happened, both before and after the battle.

  “See what happened?” Yancy repeated, quirking an eyebrow. “What does he mean by that?”