The End: An Official Minecraft Novel

by Catherynne M. Valente

  AHHHHHH! screamed Kan.

  “You have blue eyes, Fin. They’re horrible!” she giggled with delight. “But they’re nice, too. But horrible. But nice.”

  “You have green ones. They’re…they’re just nice.”

  Green eyes he’d seen before. All his life. He was used to green eyes. Green and black. It was okay. He could get past it. Even if his twin suddenly had brownish-tan skin and eyebrows and other unsettling things, like a chin.

  “Do you remember anything?” Roary asked.

  “No,” Mo said slowly. “I’m the same Mo I’ve always been. I’m an enderman.”

  “You, Fin?”

  Fin shook his head. “Same old ender-me.”

  How could this be happening? How could it be real? How could he not remember being human? Fin was an enderman. He was. He had to be. What did anything even mean if he wasn’t? And another, smaller part of him wondered: Was this why they weren’t allowed to go to the Enderdome? Was this why everyone left them to live alone on an old boat? Did everyone, somehow, somewhere deep down, know they were wrong all along?

  AHHHHHH!

  Will you stop that? thought Fin. If anyone should be screaming, it’s us.

  I cannot help it! You are monsters.

  No, we’re not. We’re your friends. Like always. Nothing’s different.

  Everything is different! To me, you are monsters! Humans! With hair and skin and big awful EARS.

  But look. Kan, look. She has green eyes. Like you. It’s not so bad, is it? She’s not so bad. I’m not so bad. Are we?

  Mo tried to reach for Kan. Loathsome the zombie pony pawed at her to keep both hands right where they were. Doesn’t the Great Chaos love all surprises? she thought hopefully.

  Not this one, Kan thought. His heart was broken. He couldn’t even look at them. Not this one.

  And then Kan vanished. One minute he was there, the next he was gone.

  Kan never did that. Not ever. Just teleported without a word. Without a single thought. Run away from them. Endermen didn’t do that. Friends didn’t, either.

  “This is so cool,” Roary said. She walked in a little circle around them, checking them out like they were some kind of science experiment. “Maybe it’s a spell or a potion. Maybe someone did this to you. Because this isn’t how pumpkins work.”

  “You just said you didn’t know how pumpkins worked,” Mo pointed out.

  “Well, maybe I don’t know the exact mechanism, but I know they don’t erase who you are when you put them on your head. I’ve worn one for days at a time and I still know my name is Roary and I like puzzles and exploring diverse biomes and hanging out with my friends and setting things on fire and suspicious stew.”

  “Yeah, you like it so much you went blind for a week the last time you had your favorite dinner.”

  “But the time before that I got Fire Resistance for a month! You never know what you’re going to get with suspicious stew! I like surprises. Anyway, that’s not the point; the point is, I might not know the deepest secrets of pumpkin nature, but I know putting one on your head doesn’t cause amnesia. So it has to be something else. And I have to know what that something else is. Sorry, I’m on your case. And I won’t give up till I solve it.”

  “Could have just hit their heads or something.” Koal shrugged. “It doesn’t have to be magic.”

  “Maybe the endermen did it. Maybe they kidnapped you when you were babies!” Roary’s voice was breathy with the excitement of a real, honest-to-everything mystery.

  Fin rubbed his head. All that hair was itchy. He’d never itched like that before. He hated it. “Maybe it’s the End itself,” he said. “The endermen didn’t build all these cities, you know. They don’t know who did, either. No one can remember. Maybe if you stay here too long, it does something weird to your memory.”

  Jesster, Koal, and Roary turned to stare at Fin. He flushed. He’d said something interesting! They were interested in him! And he found that he wanted them to think he was clever. Clever and useful. Especially Jess. If these really were his people, if he really was a human, maybe they wouldn’t keep him out of whatever they had in place of an Enderdome. If he was good enough, maybe he could belong somewhere. Maybe he could sit next to Jess in the Humandome and train for human battles against various menaces. Maybe he could be so much like a regular human that no one would guess he was brand new at it.

  Mo frowned. “But Kan remembers us. He remembers as far back as we do. The Endermas when we were five. All the times he came to the ship when his secondary hubunit chased him out.”

  “You remember all the way back to when you were five?” said Roary.

  “Yes,” the twins answered.

  “Any further back?”

  “Well…not much, but isn’t that normal? Do you remember a lot of things from before you were five?”

  “I guess that’s fair,” said Jess.

  “Okay, but you’re just saying ‘five,’ ” Roary pointed out. “Do you mean five years old? Or when you’d been here for five years? Or five months? Or five days?”

  “Five years old! Obviously! What kind of a question is that?”

  “Do you know that? For sure?”

  Neither of them could answer. They wanted to be sure, but ten minutes ago they’d been sure they were endermen and humans were evil monsters.

  Roary started pacing back and forth across the hold of the ship. “See, I don’t think you know anything. Maybe it’s all connected. The weird endermen making armies and commanders and your friend’s green eyes and your memories and all of it. And has anybody else noticed that the end rods have been getting steadily dimmer since we’ve been standing here? Something really bizarre is going on down here, and we have to rethink everything. You two have been living down here with endermen for so long you don’t know which way is up. Endermen are monsters, you guys. Do you understand that? They steal and they kill and they hunt. They ruin everything. They’re hideous—”

  “No, they’re not!” Mo cried out.

  Loathsome began to chew lightly on her sleeve. The foul foal was almost the size of a bicycle now. Mo wondered when she would stop growing.

  “Whatever you say. The point is, endermen are bad. They are capable of anything. They could have done so many terrible things to you to make you believe you were one of them! I can think of like nine or ten without any effort, and I’m a nice person! But what I can’t think of is why. Why would they convince two humans that they’re endermen? What’s the point? What’s the plan?”

  “Endermen aren’t bad!” Fin protested.

  I hate endermen, Grumpo agreed. They are bad.

  You hate everything, Mo thought. So what does that prove?

  Just because Grumpo hates everything doesn’t mean everything isn’t terrible, Grumpo reasoned. Endermen are terrible. You are terrible. Your twin is terrible. The End is terrible. Burn it all, dragon first.

  Good talk, Grumpo, thought Fin.

  Grumpo doesn’t talk to humans. The Shulker sniffed. Humans are terrible.

  “But you met Kan,” he said to the humans, who were again looking annoyed with the obvious telepathy going on. “He’s not evil.”

  “Seemed like a pretty normal enderman when he came at me,” coughed Jax, rubbing his chest where Kan had hit him.

  Koal rolled his eyes. “Oooh, one enderman can cry about how hard his life is. Big deal. Other than Kan, are they even nice to you around here? Are they friendly? Invite you to all the hot ender parties?”

  “Not…not exactly,” said Mo. “We don’t have an End, so…”

  “A what?” interrupted Jax.

  “An End. It’s like…an enderman family. A group of endermen is called an End.”

  “Super creative,” Jax snorted. “And it’s called a haunting, by the way. Not an End.”

  �
��What? That’s horrible.” Fin frowned.

  “You don’t get to say what we call ourselves,” Mo snapped.

  Koal rolled his eyes. “Well, you’re not an enderman, so you don’t get to say either.”

  “Well, we don’t have one either way,” Fin replied, “so that makes the endermen uncomfortable around us. It’s fine, it’s not their fault.”

  Jax looked around. His eyes were calculating. He was working through a big thought. “Hey,” he said, squatting down in front of Fin and Mo in a friendly manner. “Where’s all your stuff?”

  “What stuff?” Fin said defensively.

  “You two live here, right? It’s a big ship. And if I know anything about endermen I know they love stealing things. So where’s all your stuff?”

  Mo looked down, her cheeks burning. “They took it,” she whispered.

  “Who? The nice endermen? The not-bad-at-all endermen? Cleaned you out? You don’t even have a scrap to eat or a knife to protect yourself with. Those wonderful, kind, generous endermen didn’t even leave you that?”

  “Only enough to fight you,” Fin mumbled. But he still smarted. He was still angry that Kraj and his goons had robbed them. He was still hungry. Jax was right, but Fin wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

  “Well, clearly it was worth it. We are soundly defeated, aren’t we, guys?”

  “Maybe we should take them up to the Overworld,” Jess said suddenly. “Sooner rather than later. Maybe they’d recognize something. We could try healing potions. I’ve got heaps of potions at my house. So does Jax. And you never know, maybe someone would recognize them.”

  “Aw, come on, Jax and me and Roary wanna kill a dragon,” Koal said. “That’s what we came here for. We can worry about them once we’ve got the old lizard dead between the eyes. No one’s going anywhere until we do, anyway. The exit portal won’t appear until that big boy bites it.”

  “No, you won’t touch ED!” screeched Mo. Loathsome screeched with her. “And we’re not going to the Overworld either!”

  “Our hubunits…our…our parents died there. You can’t. It can rain anytime up there. Rain is death…” Every enderman knew that. To get caught in the rain was suicide.

  “No, they didn’t,” Roary said, exasperated. “I don’t know who your parents were, but they were definitely human! Humans are fine with rain! Promise!”

  “I don’t want to go to the Overworld!” Mo clung to her baby horse. Fluid oozed down Loathsome’s neck. “Fin, don’t let them take us. We don’t belong there.”

  “For god’s sake, do you even really know that you’re twins?” Jesster threw up her hands.

  “Of COURSE we’re twins,” they yelled together.

  “You don’t look anything alike. What evidence do you have that you’re even related at all? Aren’t you curious? Isn’t any chance of getting your memory back worth it? It’s really nice out there, you know. It is. You’ll love sunshine. Everyone loves sunshine.”

  “Well, I don’t!” Fin snarled. Once, he’d dreamed about going to the Overworld. Avenging his hubunits. Serving the Great Chaos. But it was too much, too fast. All he wanted in this moment was to stay on his ship with his twin and his shulker where it was safe and familiar and solid beneath his feet. He couldn’t think like this. He needed to talk to Mo and work it all out in his own good head. He didn’t need a bunch of monsters yelling at him. (But were they monsters? If they were, what was he?)

  The endermen should have let him go to the Enderdome. Maybe he would have learned something that would have provided a clue to all this.

  Mo backed up against the hull of their end ship. “It’s not nice up there. It’s the Land of Order, a miserable wasteland where the wicked rule! It’s poison and death! I won’t go, I won’t. And if you think you’re going to sail out of here and murder ED, you’ve got another think coming. You won’t leave this ship. This is our territory. You’re trespassing. And pretty soon the others are going to realize you’re here after all and they’ll come. You’ll find out where our stuff went and you won’t like it.” But we won’t like it either, Mo thought to herself. We’re human. We’re them. The End won’t know us. They’ll cut us down without a single tear. “I don’t care how many others have come with you. I don’t care how big your army is. You’re invaders and the End is plenty strong enough to destroy you.”

  “What others? It’s just us,” Koal said, confused. “What are we meant to be invading again?”

  I hate you all, Grumpo thought passionately. Grumpo will not be ruled. Grumpo is unruleable!

  Jax stood up straight and clapped his hands together. “Welp,” he announced, “I’m bored. This is stupid and I’m bored.”

  Jax leapt forward, faster than Mo would have thought possible. He grabbed her by the arm, dug into his pocket, and teleported himself, the former enderman, and the zombie horse out of the ship and into the darkness.

  Fin blinked after her. His sister was gone and he had no way to follow her.

  He was alone for the first time in his life.

  Sometimes the player dreamed it was lost in a story.

  Sometimes the player dreamed it was other things, in other places. Sometimes these dreams were disturbing. Sometimes very beautiful indeed. Sometimes the player woke from one dream into another, then woke from that into a third.

  —Julian Gough, Minecraft “End Poem”

  Commander Kraj paced back and forth on a pale yellow courtyard above a craggy, forbidding island shore. Captain Tamat and Corporal Murrum paced with him, a respectful distance behind. His bodyguard, their ranks swelled from eight to twelve now, stood gathered round the doorway from the courtyard into a massive tower that soared into the night. Almost a church, you might say, if you didn’t know that it was one.

  They waited for their audience with Eresha, the Mouth of the Great Chaos.

  She was late.

  Endermen thought of this place only in hushed, awestruck tones. Terminus, the holy island, where the Grand High and Glorious Cathedral of Entropy lay hidden from all outsiders. Hidden from most endermen, too, in fact. The Mouths of the Great Chaos had long ago decided that things seemed holiest when most people couldn’t have them. They had chosen this place. There was no good beach to come ashore easily. There were many sharp rockfaces and steep cliffs where you could fall to your death before you even realized you had made the fatal slip. And there was no end ship attached to the huge and gnarly city on the north edge of the island. Everything about Terminus whispered death and secrets. Death, and secrets, and Chaos.

  Now, endermen swarmed over every inch of crag, cliff, or stone.

  They all came to hear from Eresha. What was going to happen now? Where were the humans? Was it safe to go home? The stress and strain of being so vastly intelligent was beginning to wear on the endernation. They much preferred the relaxation of their own Ends, clever enough to decide what to have for dinner, not quite clever enough for higher math.

  Eresha, the Mouth of the Great Chaos, had not yet emerged from her residence.

  Commander Kraj could see her in her window. Her dark shape behind the banners. The old witch kept him waiting on purpose, he just knew it. But Kraj was not just a dotty old enderman no one wanted to listen to. Not anymore. He was somebody now. He was a commander. Commander meant people had to listen.

  He sniffed the night air. Kraj hadn’t slept since the Endmoot. He couldn’t afford it. Sleep was weakness. Sleep was laziness. The commander peered into the crowds below. So far below they seemed like one huge black mass to him up here. And to them, Kraj and Murrum and Tamat and the rest of his bodyguard were as invisible as memory.

  Commander Kraj shook his huge, square-jawed head. He could feel his wits dulling. He needed more.

  Kraj sent out his thoughts into the throng. Just two or three would be enough. Come to the seventh courtyard of the Cathedral of Entropy,
my follower, he called, the touch of his mind caring, calm. The Great Chaos has important work for you.

  In a quarter of an hour, three young endermen walked uncertainly through the door. They looked around for their important work. The work given to them specially by the divine source of the universe.

  Commander Kraj smiled. His mouth was little more than a tear in his face, but in the endless space of his mind, Kraj’s grin was as vast as a mountain range. He could feel strength flow through him as their intelligence stacked with the others’ and his own. Ahhhh, he thought. Yes. That is better. That is correct.

  Kraj, my fragment. Another mind cut through his own like a ship through water.

  Eresha.

  How dare she? Kraj was no one’s fragment. He was a cruxunit. Long before Eresha replicated from the hubunit stem, Kraj was whole and undivided, walking the primeval world like a giant. Perhaps having fragments at all had been a mistake. Eresha should have been grateful to him, and to the other cruxunits who survived the eons, wherever they were. If not for them, where would the End be now?

  The Mouth took in all of them. Kraj, his subordinates, the platoon that served as his own private brain bank. But not so private as all that. Eresha stood taller and thought more clearly in the presence of so many strong endermen, too. Kraj would have liked to hoard their power for himself. But it didn’t work that way. He couldn’t keep his mind sharp and Eresha’s dull just to get his way. Ender intellect only multiplied in groups. It could not divide.

  Thank you for your gracious patience, the Mouth thought.

  Kraj considered that never again would the endermen be this wise and calm. Never again would they come together like this. So many of them. So many. Why had they never done this before? Why did they not always stay together like this, and conquer all the worlds above and below?

  Eresha was not really an old witch. She was younger by far than Kraj. No cracks spoiled her beautiful dark face. No limp slowed her down. Kraj remembered the day Eresha became the Mouth of Chaos. An Endermas long gone by, when he was young enough to imagine the seat might be his instead of some young enderman’s.