The Last of the Ender Crystal Read online

  A cloud passed over Steve Alexander’s eyes. “You were never chained for being different, were you?” He barely whispered the words, as if he couldn’t believe them.

  “No,” she said. “I tried to take over the Overworld once before, and failed. But this time, I’ve learned from my mistakes. Humans will never capture me again. And either you join me, or you join the others in the dungeon.”

  “I will never join you, Jean!” he shouted, finding his voice again. “You’re a traitor!”

  She laughed lightly. “There is one more thing you should know about me. My name was never Jean, and I don’t care to be called that again. It is time to bring back my real name.” She tossed back her head, her eyes nothing but purple flames. “I am the Ender Dragon.”

  I sucked in a deep breath. It was true, it was all true!

  Jean, now the Ender Dragon, turned to the skeleton guards. “Take Steve Alexander to the dungeon with the rest,” she ordered. “Place him in the special cell I had made just in case he was stubborn.”

  Skeletons seized Steve Alexander. He didn’t even struggle. What was wrong with him? He looked so haunted, as though he could barely take in everything that he’d just learned. His best friend was really his greatest enemy. And he couldn’t say he was blameless—not when he had been the one to let her out and help her obtain this power. Not when some of her words rang true, like his quest for glory over goodness.

  The hundreds of people in the party were still being marched down into the basement. Except for Drake, who was given new armor and placed at the right hand of the Ender Dragon, working as her new guard and assistant. Mick pled his case too, and the next thing we knew he also had his own sword and armor.

  In the dungeon, people were screaming and crying. Steve Alexander was stone-faced. But then he looked up and saw the cell at the far end of the dungeon. Its door hung open, and over the top of it, it said THIS CELL IS HOME TO THE PRISONER STEVE ALEXANDER.

  I was breathing really hard, watching everything unfold. I remembered seeing that cell when we’d explored the jungle temple in our time, and now I knew why it existed. It really had been made by the Ender Dragon, specifically to humiliate Steve Alexander!

  Right when Steve Alexander was seeing this, we heard a noise. Skeletons nearby them had gotten ahold of Wolf and were trying to push the dog. Wolf yelped, wanting to be free. Steve Alexander’s eyes became alert, darting to the cell and then at the skeleton guards mistreating Wolf. He must have been remembering that his dog had been the first one to try to tell him about the Ender Dragon’s evil.

  That’s when Steve Alexander seemed to snap.

  He jerked loose of the skeleton guards, slamming them into his cell door. The skeletons holding Wolf let him go and went after Steve Alexander instead. He struck them, knocking them back. “Go, Wolf!” he called.

  He made a break for the closest wall of the dungeon, his dog racing behind him. “Even Jean doesn’t know all the secret passageways here!” He slammed his fist against the wall, opening up a hidden door. Both he and Wolf disappeared through the doorway, the hole in the wall closing up just as the skeleton guards were reaching it.

  Drake and Mick came sweeping into the dungeon, their grins and posture showing how much they were enjoying their new power as the Ender Dragon’s helpers. Stabbing his sword around like someone important, Drake called out grandly, “I’m here to see Steve Alexander in his cell.”

  “You’ll never see it, then!” Mayor Pandra was shouting at him from another cell. Young Steve was in the cell with her. You could tell he was scared, but not hurt. “He escaped through a hidden door only he knew about!”

  “Escaped?” Drake went white.

  “And he’ll be back to free us all,” she threatened.

  “Drake,” Mick whispered. “You have to tell the Ender Dragon.”

  Drake went even whiter. “No, you tell her, Mick!”

  “You’re the one who wanted to work for her, Drake!” Mick said.

  “So did you, Mick!” Drake said.

  “Only because you did first!” Mick said.

  The two of them crept guiltily up the stairs. The Ender Dragon was lounging in the now-empty party room. A few armed skeletons marched through. Someone had traced HELP into the wall as they were being dragged away.

  “How does the grand Steve Alexander look, locked away in his little cell?” the Ender Dragon asked, ready to savor the answer.

  Drake and Mick looked at the ground.

  Impatient, she snapped, “Well? Answer me!”

  “You see, he—” Drake began.

  “There was a hidden door and—” Mick added.

  “Are you saying … that he escaped?” she asked, her voice low.

  They nodded.

  The Ender Dragon’s fury exploded with an enormous roar, and she slashed at the wall in her anger, leaving claw marks embedded deep in the rock. Mick and Drake cried out and clung to each other.

  “You idiots!” she thundered. “He’s the only one who might be able to stop me!” She turned to the skeleton guards. “Go—go out into the night and find him! Send every mob in the Overworld to look for him. He will not be able to hide for long!”

  The skeleton guards spilled out of the temple into the darkness. I saw Steve Alexander in the distance with Wolf, running through the tangle of trees and vines. He could hear the hisses of zombies and the shrieks of armed skeletons on his tail. And over all the noises, he could still hear the roars of the Ender Dragon, erupting from the jungle temple as she howled for his capture.

  CHAPTER 14

  Steve alexander and wolf ducked into a mineshaft—the same one in which they’d first found the Ender Dragon. Steve Alexander leaned back against the mineshaft’s wall until he caught his breath. Then he began tearing through the mineshaft, as if looking for clues.

  “How could I have been so blind?” he exclaimed. “Wolf, you were right all along!”

  Wolf licked Steve Alexander’s hand.

  “She has my wife,” he choked out. “She has my son. She helped raise my son. And now …”

  He looked like he was close to losing it, just then. But I saw him push his sadness and fear down. He stood taller, his teeth clenched, determination on his face.

  “I won’t let her keep them!” he shouted. “I’ll free everyone, and I’ll stop her!”

  Steve Alexander and Wolf went into the room where they’d first found the Ender Dragon, and I watched my ancestor start to dig in the ground. After pulling out a few blocks of dirt, he found what he was looking for: a purple glow.

  He dug deeper, revealing the Ender shards that had been linked to her chains.

  Steve Alexander looked thoughtfully at the shards for a moment, then lifted one and struck it against a wall. With one hit, it knocked several blocks out of the wall. “Amazing!” he said. “So powerful! That must be why she was chained with these shards! But where did they come from? And also …”

  He looked into the darkness of the mineshaft, then retraced his steps. Into the portal room he went, stopping in front of the End portal.

  “She didn’t want to talk about this portal,” he mused. “I wonder where it leads. If those who imprisoned the Ender Dragon chose this cave, then the portal inside this cave must be dangerous too …”

  I could see his mind working, thinking, planning. “A place to trap a dragon …” he whispered.

  At dawn Steve Alexander made his way out of the bushes toward his home, with Wolf at his side. The night had been long, too long to be natural. He’d spent hours avoiding and fighting armed skeletons and other mobs that had been after him, barely saving himself each time.

  As he reached his home, he froze, realizing he was still not safe. His house was surrounded by armed skeletons, all standing in the building’s shadows. They were obviously waiting there to grab him and take him back to the Ender Dragon.

  He hid behind a tree before they could see him. “It’s no good,” he whispered to Wolf. “If I could get inside my hom
e, I could find more supplies. I can’t do this alone, but there’s no place in the Overworld that’s safe now—and no one in the Overworld I can still trust.”

  Then his own words gave him an idea.

  “The Nether!” he said. He ran to a shed some ways behind his home and threw the doors open. A Nether portal was sitting there, glowing purple in the middle. I understood what he was thinking: if he couldn’t find help in this world, then maybe he could find it in another.

  Down in the Nether, he assembled a makeshift crafting table and tried making something out of the Ender crystal shards, but nothing seemed to work. And with only hostile mobs around him, he had to keep searching.

  He began hauling blocks, trying different objects to construct what looked like portals. “Come on, come on,” he begged under his breath. Each attempt failed.

  Finally, frustrated, Steve Alexander threw his fist against the blocks on his latest failed portal. “Are there no worlds left?” he cried. “Is there no help?”

  Then he noticed Wolf was whimpering and pawing at something. He moved some blocks out of the way to see what the dog was so interested in. What he uncovered looked like a new set of rocks, unlike any of those he’d worked with before.

  I sucked in a deep breath.

  I knew those rocks. Those secret rocks barely anyone in the Overworld knew about. Those were the rocks needed to make a portal to Earth.

  CHAPTER 15

  Steve alexander had been through a lot in the past twelve hours, but nothing could prepare him for his first step into this new realm. Mountains, trees, ground—everything was the same, yet everything was so wrong. Instead of being their proper blocky shapes, the mountains, trees, and ground all carved and curved however they wanted to.

  And then an Earth woman attacked him.

  “It’s Maya!” Maison squealed, thrilled. We’d read all about Maya in Steve Alexander’s enchanted book. Now we watched their first meeting unfold in real life. At first she thought he was a monster, but when she realized he was human too, she backed off and invited him to come visit her people.

  The village she took him to didn’t look like any town I’d ever seen on Earth. The villagers were making their own food over open fires and using stone tools instead of their phones. I kind of liked it. The close-to-nature feeling reminded me more of how we lived in the Overworld.

  Yancy stared at them, fascinated. “It looks like a hunter-gatherer society! Holy cow, we are way back in time!”

  Steve Alexander helped Maya get food for her people, and then the two of them sat and talked. She listened while he told her the whole story of the Ender Dragon. Then she touched the purple crystals he still held.

  “And you think this will defeat her?” she asked.

  “I think I can make them into a sword,” he said. “These shards have clearly been enchanted, and I want to try new enchantments on my weapons, so Jean won’t already know how to defend herself against them. I mean”—he cringed—“the Ender Dragon. I guess there never was any Jean.”

  Maya put her hand on his shoulder. “You have lost much by no longer believing in your friend.”

  “I don’t believe in friends, period,” he said.

  She looked stern. “How can you say that? We must have friendships, or we can’t accomplish anything.”

  “If I can’t trust someone I believed in for years, how can I trust anyone?” he asked sadly.

  This time Maya grabbed him by the shoulders and made him look directly into her eyes. “You must believe not everyone is like that. Because even though we just met, I will give you reason to believe in me. I will not sit back and let another suffer when I can help it. We will fight this dragon.”

  “Ooh, I like her,” Alex cut in.

  “What do you need from me?” Maya demanded.

  “I need your protection while I experiment with enchantments and weapons,” he said. “And I want your help putting together an enchanted book I need to write, in case future generations also need to know how to defeat her. And when … if … I can chase her into that strange portal, into the new land I am going to call the End, I will leave the weapon I create for you to hide. I have never been to the End before, and I don’t know what awaits me there. I don’t know if there will be a way back, like there is with the Nether portal.”

  The seriousness of their mission hung in the air between them. Then Maya asked, “Are you sure you are ready to do this?”

  “I have to be,” he said. “The Ender Dragon was right when she said I was mostly acting heroic because I enjoyed the praise. A truly heroic person does the right thing even if no one will ever know about it. They do the right thing, no matter how dangerous, because it needs to be done. I brought the Ender Dragon into my world—it’s my responsibility to take her out of it. If I’m hated forever for unleashing her, so be it. As long as I can end this, I don’t care what people call me.”

  “You are ready,” she agreed.

  CHAPTER 16

  Suddenly the light surrounded us, and we flashed back to where the Ender Dragon and her servants were gathered.

  “What do you mean, you still haven’t found him?” the Ender Dragon raged.

  Mick and Drake trembled in front of her. “Please, have mercy!” Mick said. “The mobs have been searching every corner of the Overworld!”

  “It’s been a week!” she said. “He should have been found by now!”

  “We have his house surrounded,” Drake said. “If he returns home, we’ll nab him!”

  She looked down her snout at both of them for a long moment, then raked her claws in fury across the wall of the jungle temple. Mick and Drake clutched each other and fell to their knees.

  “Did it not cross your mind that he’s not in the Overworld?” she roared at them.

  “He has to be in the Overworld!” Mick said.

  “Yeah, where else would he be?” Drake said.

  Just then, an arrow flew past the Ender Dragon’s head and hit the wall behind her. There was a piece of paper stuck to the arrow, like a note.

  The Ender Dragon ripped the arrow loose, letting the paper fall to the floor. It landed by Drake’s feet. “What does it say?” she demanded.

  Shakily, Drake picked it up. “‘I’m at the place where we first met,’” he read. “‘Come and get me. S-A.’” He looked at Mick, confused. “Who’s S-A?”

  “That’s Steve Alexander,” Mick hissed back. Then he said, with less confidence, “I think.”

  A cruelly amused smile crawled over the Ender Dragon’s mouth. “So he’s back,” she said. To Mick and Drake, she ordered, “You stay here and watch the jungle temple. I will take care of Steve Alexander. If anything bad happens to the temple while I’m gone, I will hold both of you responsible.”

  They gave her big nods. But when she flew out into the day, they lay down on the floor as if they hadn’t slept all week.

  “Wow, I thought she’d never go,” Drake said.

  “She’s always so serious,” Mick said.

  “Why do you think Steve Alexander said, ‘Come and get me’?” Drake asked. “He’s been hiding for so long, I didn’t think he wanted to be found.”

  “He was always weird,” Mick said. “Let’s get some shut-eye.”

  They both closed their eyes. But they reopened them a moment later when they heard violent shouting outside, as if an angry crowd had gathered.

  Drake ran to the window and peered down.

  “What is it, Drake?” Mick called.

  Drake couldn’t look away. “We’re done for, Mick!”

  An entire army of Overworld soldiers was at the jungle temple doorsteps. At the front of the army was a woman—an Earth woman—with a sword. Maya!

  “Charge!” Maya commanded as the army burst through the doors.

  Mick and Drake ran to the front of the temple, holding their large wooden swords high. As soon as they got there and saw the sheer number of people, they stopped in their tracks.

  “You!” Drake pointed at Maya
. “Strange-looking lady! What are you doing here?”

  “Completing my mission,” she said. She hit something on the wall and disappeared before their eyes. A secret tunnel slid her down through the building, dropping her on her feet in the dungeon. All the prisoners in their cells looked up, amazed.

  Maya struck the switch on the wall that unlocked all the cells. “I’m here as a friend of Steve Alexander!” she called. “Everyone, grab a weapon and follow me!”

  The villager soldiers who had come with Maya were already breaking into the dungeon from above, handing extra weapons to the newly freed people.

  Maya turned to run back upstairs, only to be stopped by a hand on her arm. She looked and saw Steve Alexander’s wife.

  “How is Steve Alexander?” his wife exclaimed.

  Steve Alexander must have told Maya about his family after we’d flashed away, because Maya didn’t ask who this woman was and why she cared. “He is preparing to battle the Ender Dragon,” she said. “He told me the layout of the temple so we could take it back.”

  “What?” Mayor Pandra was horrified. “He can’t possibly be thinking of facing the Ender Dragon alone!”

  CHAPTER 17

  Light rose up around us again, and suddenly my friends and I were back in the mineshaft where Steve Alexander had first met the Ender Dragon.

  The Ender Dragon slowly trudged into the dark belly of the mineshaft. Her violet eyes narrowed in on Steve Alexander and Wolf as she approached.

  In Steve Alexander’s hands, a purple sword glistened. Wolf let out a low growl.

  “Recognize something?” Steve Alexander asked. “These are the crystals used to chain you before. They were looped in with the chains, but I took out just the crystals for this sword. And I enchanted it.”

  “Am I supposed to be scared?” she mocked. “As great an inventor as you are, you have never before created a weapon that could stop me.”