But Mo couldn’t move. She couldn’t leave Loathsome. She couldn’t even leave Jax, flying around up there in the belly of the ender dragon. Three days ago I was happy, she thought, and lay down on the earth with her hands over her head. What did it matter what happened? She wasn’t Ultimo the Magnificent. She didn’t even have a brother. She was nothing.
The song didn’t have time to start out quiet. It burst into the air at full volume, rich and lovely and sad and sweet and complicated, like everything else. Mo knew that song. She turned her head, looking for the source.
Fin tried to see through the smoke and his own tears. He knew that song, too. But Kan shouldn’t be here. He should stay safe. Stay away. Grumpo told us. Kan never stays away. Ash settled onto his hand. Fin stared at it and shuddered. He dropped below the smoke layer and crawled to where Jax had dropped his crossbow. He wrapped his arms around it and held it tight. ED wasn’t going to get Kan too. It just wasn’t.
But ED wasn’t going after Kan. It wasn’t moving.
It was listening.
The ender dragon cocked its head to one side, listening intently to the music. Its muscles held perfectly still. Kan advanced out of the shadows, playing his note block better than any note block had ever been played or ever will. His green eyes glowed in the black fog.
Mo put her hand on Fin’s arm. He nearly jumped out of his skin.
You scared the life out of me! he thought wildly.
Mo looked deep into his eyes. Eyes that had been purple until three days ago. She held him tight. And between their minds they understood everything in an instant. They didn’t have to plan. They didn’t have to argue.
Kan can’t die, thought Mo. No matter what it costs. And a moment after that: And none of the rest of them, either. It’s not their fault their vacation turned into our nightmare. They don’t deserve to lose everything.
I don’t want to remember anyway, Fin thought. We failed. I don’t want to remember we failed.
The End is what counts. Our End.
They were both holding the crossbow.
Fin let go.
Mo stood up and strode across the island. The End burned behind her. Her hair glowed in the light. ED turned to see her. It heard no more music. It saw no other prey. Only her. The ender dragon spread its black wings into the sky, bellowed to the heavens, bent down, and launched itself toward her. Mo didn’t flinch. She aimed and she fired true.
Game over, the ender dragon bellowed into her brain. Try again?
The bolt took the ender dragon between the eyes. The lights went out in ED.
But not before the colossal bulk of its body slammed into Ultimo the Magnificent, crushing her mercilessly against the stony earth.
Ash, smoke, embers floated through the air. Kan and Fin ran to her, never once thinking they could make one bit of difference.
They found two things where Mo died.
Her body, and a glistening black-and-violet egg.
Fin alone sat on the deck of the ship. The night flowed all around him. There was a certain taste in the air. A tang of ozone and burnt obsidian. Telos crumbled in the distance. The End was coming apart. Getting ready to be reborn. Only this time without her. And no one would know the difference.
He remembered everything. El Fin the Archmage. His life in the Overworld. What pigs looked like. How many times he had discovered how big Grumpo’s box really was. Everything. In that magical space between the End and the Beginning, his mind was completely clear.
But he didn’t much care.
He held a book in his lap. One of the ones from the hold. The empty hold. At the end of the last cycle it’d been crammed full to bursting. No war that time. No Commander Kraj. This time he’d have to start from scratch. In every way. The book was Curse of Binding Level Two. Fin turned to the first page. You can add the Curse of Binding enchantment to any piece of armor such as helmets, chestplates, leggings, or boots…it read.
El Fin the Archmage turned the page over and began to write on the back.
I am not afraid anymore. So much has happened. Kraj is dead by my own hand. Eresha is dead. Karshen and Koneka are dead. Mo is gone. The ender dragon is dead. Poor Loathsome. Poor Grumpo. Poor all of us. The End itself is coming apart. The islands cannot hold. The sky is falling. If I try to forget what I’m looking at, it’s beautiful. Really. So beautiful. The towers of Telos are falling like confetti. It is coming. The great tide of memory will wash over me and I will know nothing about all this grief. And do you know? I think I welcome it.
I have retreated to the ship. Lying on the deck, I can watch the night tear itself apart. When I close my eyes, I can hear Kan playing somewhere far away. Good. He is alive. I’m glad. He’s coming to find me. To be part of my End.
It’s almost here. I can feel it moving through the islands. Completely inevitable. Why fight it?
All hail the Great Chaos. Blessed be the Beginners.
See you on the other side, Ultimo.
A cool hand slipped into his.
“Not if I see you first,” Mo said.
Fin went pale. Then he tackled her in one of the greatest and fiercest hugs in recorded human history. “You’re alive!”
One of the Telosian pagodas tumbled off the side of the island into the void.
Mo patted her pocket.
“Totem of Undying. Brings you back feeling like roadkill. But it brings you back. I understand how to use it now. So here I am. You can’t keep a good brewmaster down.”
They lay back on the deck of their home, looking up at the starless night. The starless future. They listened to Kan’s music, getting closer and closer as he walked toward them. Not teleporting, but walking, as his friends did. As his End did. He would be here soon. He quite literally couldn’t be late.
“I wish we’d fixed it, like you wanted,” Ultimo said. “I think I’ve said that exactly a thousand times.”
“I don’t know,” Fin sighed. “Maybe we’re as fixed as we’re going to get. It’s only…them. Jess and Jax and Roary and Koal. They didn’t deserve to get mixed up in our little dance down here. They should be up there. Kicking pigs and dancing in the rain.”
Mo brushed her long, dark hair out of her face.
“About that,” she said. “I don’t think Ultimo the Magnificent can really take an L that big. It’s just not in her nature. But…you know what that means.”
Fin nodded.
“Can you make that choice for them?”
El Fin the Archmage squeezed her hand. He stroked her face with his hand. Not his twin. But still his family.
“You saw them. The cycle is getting worse. It’s evolving. It’s changing the laws of nature. Endermen use weapons and build armies and…apparently humans don’t respawn. I’m only here because of my totem, and here’s hoping I remember to grab another one on the next go-round. They should have woken up in their own beds. But you saw them. They were just lying there on the ground. Cold and quiet and gone. We can’t leave them like that. We just can’t. And you never know. Grumpo said they were new. Maybe this is what changes everything. Maybe this time it’s different.”
Mo nodded. She pulled a few things out of her infinitely deep pockets, assembling them on the deck with the practiced ease of an expert. Five potions in a neat row. Regeneration potions, but more powerful than any the Overworld had seen since Ultimo the Magnificent lit out for parts unknown.
“If it’s not,” she said as she finished, “that’s okay, too. I’ve had a good thousand lives with you, Fin. A thousand more won’t hurt.”
“But will they remember us? If this works? If they come back like we do? Will we remember them?”
Mo sat back on her heels. “No.” She sighed. “I don’t think we will.”
“I don’t want to forget again. I don’t want to forget Jess. Or any of them,” he added quickly.
/>
“Me neither. But we never remember.” She capped off the potions. “At first. Maybe this time there will be some small thing that’s different. That sparks us. Like it did this time. Maybe it’ll be Grumpo or Loathsome or ED or something Kan says or the glint in Roary’s eye. Maybe it’ll even be awful old Kraj. Maybe it’ll be Jax calling me a melon or Koal laughing or Jess swinging her sword. Maybe all of us together…maybe we’ll stack, even though we’re humans. Become something more than we were separately. Something. Something new. Something…Chaotic. And maybe we’ll begin to remember next time. Before it’s too late. When there’s still time for remembering to matter. Maybe this time, we do it all right. And everything changes.”
Kan’s dark head appeared over the side of the ship as he floated toward them. He let his note block fall silent. They didn’t have to say anything. They never did.
Fin, Mo, and Kan walked down into the hold together and sat down to rest. Then, Mo decided nothing could really be awkward when the universe was collapsing. She snuggled into Kan’s side. Fin leaned against their backs. And they waited. The slumber party at the end of the world.
“Can you feel it? I can feel it coming,” she whispered. “Like a tsunami. First the water retreats, and for a minute you think everything is going to be okay. Then it rises up and washes everything away. I love you.”
“I love you too, Ultimo,” Kan said. He squeezed her tight. “You really were magnificent.”
Mo winked. “You too, green. You too.”
“See you on the other side,” whispered El Fin the Archmage.
* * *
—
The wave of memory passed over the ship an hour later. Fin and Mo and Kan fell asleep long before it came. The world shifted, and tilted, and righted itself, and remembered nothing.
About an hour after that, the shulker box at the back of the ship creaked open. Something emerged. Not a shulker. Not an enderman. Not a creeper or a skeleton or a witch or a human. Something the color of a shulker, and the shape of the unpredictability of all life.
Very gently and tenderly, Grumpo fitted a pumpkin onto Fin’s head, and then Mo’s. He’d do the same for the others when they turned up. It wouldn’t be long now. Grumpo tucked in the vines and made sure they looked nice and neat. He bent down and kissed each of their foreheads.
“I hate you both so terribly much,” the Great Chaos whispered.
And vanished.
The atoms of the player were scattered in the grass, in the rivers, in the air, in the ground. A woman gathered the atoms; she drank and ate and inhaled; and the woman assembled the player, in her body.
And the player awoke, from the warm, dark world of its mother’s body, into the long dream.
And the player was a new story, never told before, written in letters of DNA. And the player was a new program, never run before, generated by a sourcecode a billion years old. And the player was a new human, never alive before, made from nothing but milk and love.
You are the player. The story. The program. The human. Made from nothing but milk and love…
Shush.
Sometimes the player created a small, private world that was soft and warm and simple.
Sometimes.
—Julian Gough, Minecraft “End Poem”
It is always night in the End. There is no sunrise. There is no sunset. There are no clocks ticking away.
But that does not mean there is no such thing as time. Or light. Ring after ring of pale yellow islands glow in the darkness, floating in the endless night. Violet trees and violet towers twist up out of the earth and into the blank sky. Trees full of fruit, towers full of rooms. White crystal rods stand like candles at the corners of the tower roofs and balconies, shining through the shadows. Sprawling, ancient, quiet cities full of these towers glitter all along the archipelago, purple and yellow like everything else in this place. Beside them float great ships with tall masts. Below them yawns a black and bottomless void.
It is a beautiful place. And it is not empty.
The islands are full of endermen, their long, slender black limbs moving over little yellow hills and little yellow valleys. Their narrow purple-and-pink eyes flash. Their thin black arms swing to the rhythm of a soft, whispering music, plotting their plots and scheming their schemes in the tall, twisted buildings older than even the idea of a clock. They watch everything. They say nothing.
Shulkers hide in boxes nestled in ships and towers. Little yellow-green slugs hiding from outsiders. Sometimes they peek out. But they snap their boxes safely shut again, like clams in their shells. The gentle thudding sound of their cubes opening and closing is the heartbeat of the End.
And on the central and largest island, enormous obsidian towers surround a small pillar of grey stone ringed with torches. A brilliant lantern gleams from the top of each tower. A flame in a silver cage, shooting beams of light down from the towers into the grass, across a little grey courtyard, and out into the black sky.
Above it all, something slowly circles. Something huge. Something with wings. Something that never tires. Round and round it goes, and its purple eyes glow like furious fire.
Fin!
The word came zinging through the shade off the shore of one of the outer islands. A huge end city loomed over most of the land: Telos. Telos sprouted out of the island highlands like something alive. Great pagodas and pavilions everywhere. White shimmers fell from the glistening end rods. Shulkers clapped in their little boxes. Leashed to Telos like a dog floated a grand purple ship. A pirate ship without an ocean to sail. Most of the end cities had ships attached to them. No one was certain why, any more than they’re certain who built all those big, strange cities in the first place. Not the endermen, though they were happy to name every place after themselves. Not the thing flying in endless circles around a gate to nowhere. Not the shulkers who never came out of hiding long enough to learn anything about anything. The end ships just were, as the cities just were, as the End just was, like clouds or diamonds or Tuesdays.
Fin! Find anything good?
A skinny young enderman teleported quickly across the island, in and out of the nooks and crannies of Telos. He blinked off in one place and back on in another until he stood on the deck of the end ship, holding something in his arms. His head was handsome, black and square. His eyes were bright and hungry. His limbs were slim but strong. An enderman leaned against the mast, waiting for him. She crossed her dark arms across her thin chest.
Nothing good, Mo. Just a bunch of pearls. We’ve got tons of those. Ugh. You take them. They give me the creeps. I was sure the chestplates we found last week would regen by now but I guess somebody else got there first. I got some redstone ore. That’s about it. You go next time. You always sniff out the good stuff.
The twin twelve-year-old endermen, brother and sister, Fin and Mo, headed down into the guts of their ship. They’d always lived here. Here on the ship with their two brothers and their two sisters. Jax and Koal and Jess and Roary. And every day, their dear friend Kan would visit. Kan was tall and dark and thin like all the enderfrags were. Taller than Roary but shorter than Jax. He had big, beautiful eyes, but he was always squinting, trying to hide them, trying to make them unnoticeable.
Because Kan’s eyes weren’t like the wide, clear magenta-violet eyes of other endermen.
Kan’s eyes were green.
And he played the note block better than you’d ever believe a note block could be played.
Jax liked to tease Mo that she was sweet on Kan. Brothers were like that.
They couldn’t remember any other place.
They grew up here. It was their home. No different from any of the hundreds of endermen you’d find on any island here in the archipelago. They lived on an end ship crammed with junk they’d snatched up from anywhere they could find it. Some of it was very good junk. Diamonds and emeral
ds, gold ore and lapis lazuli. Enchanted iron leggings, pickaxes of every kind, beetroot seeds and chorus fruits, saddles and horse armor (though they’d never seen a horse). Dozens of sets of marvelous grey wings you could stick right on your back and fly around anywhere you liked. Some of it was just plain old actual junk. Rocks and clay and sand and old books with broken spines. A moldy greenish-blue egg with weird veins running all over it. Fin and Mo didn’t care how ugly it looked. They put the egg by the fire and hoped for something unpredictable to happen. Something new.
The family of endermen knew there were other worlds out there. It was only logical, when you lived in a place called the End. If there was an End, there had to be a Beginning. Somewhere else for this place to be the End of. Somewhere the opposite of here. Green and bright, with blue skies and blue water, full of sheep and pigs and bees and squid. They’d heard the stories. But this was their world. They were safe here, the seven of them, with their own things and their own kind and their own story.
One big happy End.
For Aurora and Cole
I am only ever a portal away
BY CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE
Space Opera
The Refrigerator Monologues
The Glass Town Game
Radiance
Deathless
Palimpsest
THE FAIRYLAND SERIES
The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland—For a Little While
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two
The Boy Who Lost Fairyland
The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home
The End: An Official Minecraft Novel Page 20