by Mur Lafferty
He turned around, not meeting her eyes. “I found this in Uncle Nicholas’s tree house in the crystal. I thought it was enchanted. It…well, it was enchanted. Cursed, really.”
Alison’s mouth fell open. “You mean every piece of armor you’re now wearing is cursed? And you took off solid diamond armor to wear leather armor that you can’t remove?”
He flushed. “Yeah, I know. It’s terrible. I’m stupid. I should have grabbed the milk and come back to you guys. Anything you were going to say to me, I’ve thought of it already, believe me. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Maybe I’m cursed with this stuff forever.” He shrugged, uncomfortable.
Alison smiled sadly. “You’re not stupid. That armor is a connection with your uncle. I think I’d grab any connection to my family right about now. Even one of my mother’s garish banners. Even an enchanted terrible banner. We’ll get that off you somehow, just, you know, be careful.”
“It could be a good opener for a conversation when we find him,” Freya suggested. “Hey Uncle, guess what, you didn’t kill me, but oh yeah, I’m stuck in this awful armor you made, can you help a guy out?”
Max surprised himself by laughing alongside Alison and Freya, trying to imagine Nicholas’s face when he told him he was here to rescue him and, by the way, he also was wearing a full suit of cursed armor.
Alison sobered. “I’m not sure there’s anything we, or even your uncle, can do, though. That’s why it’s a curse. It’s on you until it is destroyed.”
He grimaced. “And anything that destroys the armor is likely to kill me soon after it falls off, right?” he asked.
“Probably,” Freya said, nodding. “We could just dip parts of you in lava until the armor burns away and then pull you out really fast. That might work.”
Alison had an image of holding Max by his feet over a lava pit, trying to burn off the cursed diamond helmet, and shuddered. There had to be a better way.
Freya crossed her arms and focused on the skeletons. “I’ve been trying something with Bunny Biter,” she said thoughtfully. “I think it might help us out a lot.” She gave the wolf a pat, waking her up. She’d been sleepy since her adventure with the pigmen and the blaze, and Alison suspected she had a very full stomach. Bunny Biter looked up with an inquisitive whine.
“Bunny Biter!” Freya said in a commanding voice. The wolf jumped to her feet, alert. “Sic tibia!”
The wolf was off in a flash, heading for the skeletons. “They’ll tear her to pieces, she can’t take them all on!” Alison said.
“Relax, if it all goes south then we run in and help,” Freya said.
Alison fumbled for her bow. It would have been nice to know they were about to fight. She was still trying to figure out how to get the cursed armor off Max. She nocked an arrow and aimed at the mobs.
The white wolf was still running at full speed, heading for the nearest skeleton. It noticed her and tried to back away, but the wolf was closing in fast. The other skeletons noticed the commotion and started clacking away from Bunny Biter.
“Freya, this was a bad idea,” Max said, raising his sword, but Freya put a hand on his shoulder.
“Just give her a minute,” she said, watching intently.
The wolf reached her prey, but she didn’t leap and attack. She darted in low and clamped her powerful jaws around the skeleton’s lower leg bones and yanked. The startled menace flailed as it fell backward, taking another skeleton down with it. Bunny Biter shook her head once, snapping the leg off, and then ran off, the bony foot flopping on the end of the leg as she ran. The other skeletons followed this new, strange threat at a safe distance, shooting off the occasional projectile at her, while the de-legged one rolled around, trying to get up and failing. Freya almost leisurely put a few arrows into it, and it disappeared, leaving behind a bow and a bone.
“Will she be okay?” Alison asked, watching the wolf lead the skeletons away.
“She’s faster than they are. If she gets hurt, she can eat the leg she’s carrying. She’ll be fine,” Freya said. “Come on.” She and Alison started forward.
Max heard a whistling in the sky, and grabbed both girls’ arms and pulled them backward.
THUD. A very large cube, black with red eyes, and radiating more heat than even the surrounding area, landed where they had just been standing.
* * *
—
“Scatter!” Freya cried, and took off away from the lava lake. Max and Alison followed.
“What is that?” Alison yelled.
Freya looked back at her with wide eyes. “It’s a magma cube. And don’t run with me! Scatter!” Without warning, she cut to the right, running in a completely different direction. Alison chanced a look backward, but didn’t see the menacing cube anymore.
She slowed, which probably saved her, because the cube landed in front of her with another thud, throwing her off her feet with the force of its landing.
She hit the ground and rolled, the heat of the monster wafting off in waves. She really didn’t want that thing touching her.
“Why can’t we meet anyone nice?” she yelled, climbing to her feet. The cube launched itself into the air again and she watched its trajectory, then ran forward, passing under it so that it landed behind her.
Max appeared by her side, holding his sword. “You okay?” he asked, his eyes on the cube.
“We need to split up,” Alison said. “That thing will crush you without good armor, don’t get under it!” She dashed off in a new direction, pulling her bow from her pack and hoping Max took her advice.
“These things look like slimes,” Max said, crossing her path to run the other way. He kept talking over his shoulder. “Fire slimes, anyway. I bet they’ll break apart like slimes!”
Alison ran for a few moments, and then heard Max whoop in triumph. She risked slowing down and looking for him.
The cube was gone. Around Max now were four smaller cubes. They looked just as scary, but more manageable even with their greater number.
“It worked!” Max yelled as the group of cubes split up. Two of them came for Alison, one hopped tentatively toward Freya after spying the spot she had taken on a hill to get a better shot with her bow, and the last one jumped toward Max as he swung his sword at it.
“Keep it up, they’ll keep breaking down,” Freya called, raising her bow for a shot. “Stay alert.”
“Who’s falling asleep?” Max asked, swinging again and catching the cube in mid-jump. This sword didn’t have a knockback enchantment, but it was clearly a much better weapon. It sliced right into the cube and then knocked it sideways. He hadn’t split it fully, and now it was bouncing and heading for him again.
Alison’s bow was just a plain old bow; diamond could do nothing to make that better. So she shot an arrow at the closest cube, hitting the right spot but the arrow bounced off the cube’s tough crust. If she couldn’t pierce it with an arrow, how was she going to fight it?
Freya was stronger than she was, and the cube pursuing her had several arrows sticking out of it. With one more, it shuddered, bounced backward, and separated into four tiny cubes.
Alison didn’t have time to watch them and figure out how they could fight the tiny ones, but Freya didn’t look so concerned now. Max was running toward Alison, but the two cubes heading for her were way ahead of him.
She thought fast, and pulled her pickaxe from her pack. She quickly dug a hole a few blocks wide and two deep, and then stood in front of it.
“Come on, take the bait, I’m just standing here, begging to be squashed by you,” she muttered. Both cubes leaped again, sailing toward her. As they fell, she jumped away at the last moment.
It worked, partly. One of the cubes fell into the pit behind her.
The other one got lucky and landed on the edge of the pit right beside her. It glared at her, trembling. Aliso
n realized it was getting ready to jump again, so she kicked it with her diamond boot. It fell into the pit, colliding in midair with the other cube as it tried to jump out. They both tumbled and hit the ground inside the pit, and Alison leaped forward with netherrack cubes at the ready.
With one quick motion she filled in the hole, trapping them before they could jump out. She could hear their frantic thumps as they jumped and hit the ceiling of the chamber she had created.
She threw a few more netherrack blocks on top just to make sure they would stay in there, then stood back and sighed in relief.
Freya was stomping on the tiny magma cubes, but Max was ignoring the ones he had created.
Alison raised an eyebrow and pointed at the tiny bouncing fire cubes trying desperately to follow Max. “Are you going to clean up your mess?”
“I was going to ask if someone without cursed boots would help me out here,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to go around stomping on magma.”
Oh. Alison ran forward to finish stomping out the mobs. Her enchanted diamond boots didn’t even register the heat she was stepping on.
Once more she worried about Max fighting in cursed armor. How long would he be forced to wear this, and would he survive if it fell off in the middle of a fight?
Freya joined them and looked around. The area near the fortress was quiet, for the moment.
“It’s clear. Let’s go.”
* * *
—
In the other buildings they had explored, Max and Alison had found all of the crafting and enchanting areas in side or basement rooms, almost as if Nicholas (and whoever had occupied Freya’s fortress before she did) wanted to keep the crafting and enchanting a secret. This place, though, put creation front and center.
The room that, in another fortress, would have been a ballroom or a great dining hall was the crafting room, with furnaces, crafting tables, and the usual run of creation blocks they were now used to. They opened a few of the chests, which were much emptier than those in previous places they’d visited, which was disappointing, although they did find a few blocks of obsidian in one.
“Not enough to make a portal,” Max said. “Maybe he’s off looking for more, so he can come back and finish it?”
“We don’t know for sure this is your uncle’s fortress,” Freya reminded him, looking around the room. “This could belong to someone else. Or your uncle is somewhere in the building; we haven’t looked through the whole thing. Maybe he got hungry. He could just be in the kitchen eating some ender steaks.”
“Is that…a thing?” Alison asked.
Freya looked at her pointedly. “It should be,” she said.
Ali turned slightly green and dropped the topic. She left the room, muttering something about checking the rest of the wing of the house, and returned shortly saying that no one was in the kitchen, but she was happy to report a few cauldrons of fresh water. She looked less green and more refreshed.
They went through the remaining chests, although no one donned any of the few pieces of armor they found, with Max’s cursed items as their example of the consequences of being too eager with loot.
Two chests did hold much more exotic provisions than the others: supplies Max and Alison had never seen before, like boiling tears, small living flames, and the creepiest thing Max had ever seen.
Alison opened one chest and jumped back with a yell. She edged closer and peeked inside, Freya and Max coming up behind her.
A huge green eye peered out from the chest at her, looking around the room, focusing on Alison, and then checking out the room again. “What is that?” she asked.
Freya looked in the chest, and then at Alison. “It’s an eye,” she said slowly.
Alison glared at her. “Fine. Then what is a giant green eye doing— No, wait.” Freya would tell her the eye was just looking around. She rephrased the question. “Why is there a giant green eye in this chest, and what is it used for?”
Freya grinned at her, looking as if she wanted nothing more than to take Alison literally all day, but they didn’t really have that kind of time, so Max spoke. “I’ve heard of magical eyes that can find strongholds in the Overworld. I don’t know if this is one of those, or if it can do that down here.”
“Well, since we’re in a fortress, it would find the one we’re in and call its job done, wouldn’t it?” Freya asked. She peered over Alison’s shoulder. “Is that all that’s in there?”
“There are three of them, and that’s it,” Alison said, frowning in disgust and stepping back. “Let’s look in the other chests. I don’t want anything to do with those things.”
They found several books and enchanting tables. Freya and Alison glanced at Max, and then at their as-yet-unenchanted equipment. Max looked up eagerly. “I’m game to try it if you are!” he said.
Freya shook her head. “We’ve got too much cursed armor already. Experimenting now will just cause more pain and suffering.”
“I need to practice if I’m going to get better,” he grumbled. He wandered down the rows of bookshelves as he sulked, trailing his hands along the spines of the books.
“All right, we’ve got ourselves a fortress, we need a missing uncle, and then we keep looking for a portal. Or more obsidian. Want to guess where the uncle might be?” Freya asked, walking to the window of a tower room where they had discovered three enticing-looking beds. Or death traps, as Freya called them. Considering that sleeping in a bed in the Nether would cause deadly explosions, these beds were an insult to their backs, which were sore from sleeping on the ground.
Max suddenly realized he would gladly take any punishment his mother wanted to dish out to him if he could just sleep in his own bed again. His homesickness hit with an unexpected punch, and he wondered how his mom was dealing with their absence. How long had they been gone, anyway? She must be so worried. She’ll never let me leave the house again. He sighed, his breath shaky. They’d get through this. They had to. He had to get home.
Alison looked at the beds with the same longing as Max. She tore her eyes away from their deceptive welcome and joined Freya at the window. “Well, we could stay here and wait for him to come back. Maybe he was waiting on someone—”
“Somewolf—” Freya corrected.
“…wolf, right; he was waiting for the monsters to go away, regardless,” Alison said. “Speaking of which, where is that wolf?”
“She’ll be back at some point,” Freya said, but her focus on the outside landscape showed her concern.
“We should go out and look for Nicholas,” Max said. “I can’t stay cooped up in here waiting for him.”
“He has a good point,” Alison said thoughtfully. “Then again, if you’re out there fighting while wearing cursed armor, that’s not very good protection.”
“I’ll be careful,” he said. “You’re not a hundred percent better yet; it doesn’t make sense for you to go and me to stay. And if we all go, with our luck, we’ll leave and he’ll come back here. Or we’ll stay here and he’ll be out there, dying of a wither cut or drowning in lava or something.”
“Then we split up,” Freya said. “Alison stays here and waits; you and I go out and make sure the path to the fortress is clear.” Her eyes almost gleamed in the low light.
“I’m game to stay here. There’s plenty to read. But how can you go looking for a fight right now?” Alison asked, sounding weary.
Freya shrugged. “It’s about all I do. Hunt mobs. Find food. You guys showing up has given me the most variety of the past several months, honestly. And the three of us are still hunting mobs.”
Max brushed off his cursed armor. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Then we can find your wolf when we go out.”
“There’s a bonus,” Freya agreed, but Max could tell she was relieved to not leave Bunny Biter out there on her own.
T
hey helped Alison set up torches throughout the hallways and rooms she thought she would be using while they were gone, lighting the areas to avoid attracting monsters, and then checked their equipment and supplies.
“You got some good stuff at your uncle’s,” Freya said, going through his inventory. “Healing potions, protective potions, more milk. I wonder why he didn’t take this with him.”
“I think he left in a hurry,” Max said. “He also left a few journals behind. But hopefully we can ask him when we find him. Come on, the day isn’t getting any longer.”
“Actually, it’s always day here,” Freya said. “So it’s not getting any shorter, either. But I’m ready.” She slung her pack over her shoulder.
Alison waved at them from her place at a crafting table, where she was engrossed in a book. “Be careful out there. This book says there are some pretty nasty mobs.”
“What are you reading?” Max leaned in close, peering at the cover. “A journal by ‘Leocadia’? What kind of name is that?” Max asked. “And are you telling me there are things out there nastier than what we’ve already met?” Alison shrugged and didn’t look up from the book. “Anyway, don’t burn down the place while we’re gone,” he added.
She grinned up at him. Max and Freya closed the fortress door behind them and looked over the red landscape. Max was getting tired of this scene, always low light, always red and heat-shimmery. On the horizon, a few skeletons pursued something, their weapons raised. Max pointed. “I think that’s as good a place to start as any.”
Freya checked her arrow supply. “Then let’s go.”
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THE GRANDMOTHER JOURNAL
Alison marked her place in the journal as she watched them go, wondering if their plans would work out or if they would discover that Nicholas was gone for good. She was beginning to lose hope, although she’d never tell Max that. But how long were they going to search for him?
Max was wearing all cursed armor, she’d nearly died from a wither skeleton attack, and they kept finding enticing and dangerous crafting areas designed like they were meant to trap them and encourage them to make bad decisions.