The Trials of the enderdragon

The Adventures of Steve and Gary Book 1 : The Trials of The Ender Dragon 1.

Chapter 1: I Accidentally Punch a Tree and Everything Goes Square Look, I didn’t ask to be a blocky guy in a blue shirt. If you’re reading this because you think waking up in a world where the sun is a literal cube sounds "aesthetic" or "chill," stop reading right now. Go play a normal game where the characters have elbows and knees. Believe whatever lie your parents told you about "creative mode" being a relaxing Sunday hobby. But if you recognize yourself in these pages—if you’ve ever felt a weird, magnetic urge to punch a piece of oak until it floats in mid-air—you might be in trouble. And once the creepers find out you're here, they won’t be coming over to borrow a cup of sugar. My name is Steve. I have no last name, no memories prior to ten minutes ago, and apparently, no skeletal structure that allows for curved lines. I’m basically a sentient stack of boxes with a goatee. I woke up on a beach. That sounds romantic, right? Like a vacation. Except the sand wasn't soft; it was made of individual, meter-wide cubes that crunched like gravel, and the ocean looked like a giant vat of blue Jell-O that didn't know how to splash. It just kind of... ebbed in blocks. I stood up, and my joints made a sound like two massive Lego bricks snapping together. I looked at the horizon. Everything was square. The clouds? Rectangles. The sun? A giant, glowing yellow box. Even my own hands were just fleshy hammers. "Okay," I muttered. My voice sounded raspy, like it was being filtered through a retro microphone from the eighties. "New world. No map. No instructions. No pants... wait, I have pants. Denim. Good start, Steve. You’re crushing it." I didn't know why I knew I needed to move, but a voice in the back of my head—let’s call it my Survival Instinct, or maybe just a guy named Gary who lives in my subconscious—was screaming that I had about ten minutes of daylight left before things got "munchy." I walked up to the nearest tree. It was a thick, blocky oak with leaves that looked like green pixelated clouds. I didn't have an axe. I didn't even have a sharp rock. "Sorry about this, buddy," I said to the tree. I hauled back and punched the trunk. Thud. Now, in the real world, punching a tree results in a broken hand and a very confused park ranger. In this world? The tree groaned. A little spiderweb crack appeared in the bark. I hit it again. Thud. Thud. Pop. A section of the trunk vanished and reappeared as a spinning, miniature version of itself hovering an inch off the ground. I picked it up. It felt heavy, yet light enough to fit into an invisible "inventory" I could feel just behind my eyeballs. "I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay," I sang nervously. I didn't feel okay. I felt like I was being watched by something that didn't have a face. I spent the next few minutes performing what I like to call the "Lumberjack Special," which involves slapping trees until they float. It felt ridiculous, but by the time I was done, I had enough wood to build a small cabin—or at least a very sturdy doghouse. I sat down on the grass and opened my mental crafting menu. It was like a 2x2 grid burned into my brain. I put the wood in, and—poof—a crafting table appeared. "Now we're cooking with gas," I said, though I didn't actually have gas. Or a stove. Or food. Using the table, I lashed some sticks to some planks and created a wooden pickaxe. It looked like something a toddler would build in shop class, but the moment I held it, I felt a surge of power. I wasn't just a victim of geometry anymore. I was a tool-user. Then the sun started dipping toward the horizon. In this world, the sun doesn't "set" so much as it makes a hasty retreat. The shadows began to stretch across the grass like long, dark fingers reaching for my ankles. The temperature dropped forty degrees in about three seconds. "Okay, Gary," I whispered to my survival instinct. "Where do we go?" Dig, Gary whispered back. Dig or die. I didn't need to be told twice. I found a small limestone cliffside and started swinging my wooden pickaxe. Clink. Clink. Clink. The stone gave way much easier than it should have, popping into neat little cobblestone cubes. I burrowed about four meters in, then turned around and looked at the world outside. The sky had turned a bruised purple. And then, I heard it. 2.

Rattle-clack-clack. It sounded like a bag of marbles being shaken by a very angry ghost. I peeked out. About fifty yards away, standing under the shadow of a tree, was a skeleton. Not a "museum exhibit" skeleton, but a "walking, bow-wielding, hates-your-guts" skeleton. It turned its hollow eye sockets toward me and notched an arrow. "Nope!" I yelled. I frantically grabbed a couple of dirt blocks and slammed them into the opening of my cave. Thump. Thump. Total darkness. I sat in the pitch-black silence, clutching my wooden pickaxe like it was a magical sword from some Greek legend. It wasn't. It was a piece of wood held together by hope and pixels. Mooooooaaaaan. Something was directly outside my dirt wall. It was a low, gurgling sound, like a zombie with a bad case of laryngitis. Then came a frantic scratching, followed by a series of heavy thuds against the dirt. Hiss. A sharp, static noise flared up, making my hair stand on end. It sounded like a fuse being lit. I backed away until my square spine hit the cold stone at the back of my hole. "I'm just a block," I whispered to the dark. "I'm not delicious. I’m mostly wood and denim. Go eat a cow." I spent the next several hours—which felt like several years—staring at the void. I couldn't see my own hands. I realized then that this world wasn't a playground. It was a giant, clockwork machine designed to test if I was smart enough to survive the night. I had no torches. I had no bed. I just had me, my square fists, and the terrifying realization that I was the only thing on the menu tonight. But as I sat there, listening to the rattle of bones and the moans of the undead, a new feeling started to itch at the back of my brain. It wasn't fear. It was spite. You want to eat me? I thought. Fine. But tomorrow, I’m getting stone. And then I’m getting coal. And then, I’m coming for your bones. The moon climbed higher, casting silver slivers of light through the cracks in my dirt door. I didn't sleep. I just waited for the light, planning my revenge against the geometry of the night. The scratching outside finally stopped, replaced by a hauntingly quiet breeze. For a second, I thought I was safe. Then, a soft pop came from the corner of my cave—not from the door, but from the darkness behind me. "Gary?" I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs. Gary didn't answer. But something else did. Two glowing purple eyes flickered to life in the back of the tunnel, staring at me with a gaze that felt like a cold needle in my brain. Welcome to my life. It was about to get way weirder. I’m not a brave man. Or a brave block. Whatever. The moment those purple eyes flickered in the dark, my first instinct was to scream like a startled parrot, but Gary hit the brakes on my vocal cords with the force of a freight train. "Don't look at it," Gary hissed in the back of my mind, sounding more panicked than usual. "Stare at your toes. Examine the texture of the gravel. Just. Don't. Make. Eye. Contact." I stared at the floor so hard I thought I’d give myself a migraine, watching the tall, spindly shadow in my periphery that looked like a piece of charcoal stretched on a rack until it reached the ceiling. It made a sound like a radio tuning between stations—a chaotic mess of static, clicks, and a distorted "Vwoop" that vibrated in my teeth—before the air shifted with the sound of a heavy book slamming shut, and the eyes were gone. "Okay," I whispered, wiping sweat from my square brow as I realized that if it was tall, dark, and purple, I was officially legally blind. I couldn't sit there and wait to be eaten by whatever interdimensional beanpole just visited me, so since the surface was crawling with skeletons and the back of my cave had teleporting nightmares, I gripped my wooden pickaxe and decided the only way left to go was down. Clink. A block of stone popped. Clink. Another one. I started digging a staircase into the belly of the world, descending into a pitch-black void save for the faint, rhythmic glow of my own inventory screen. Every few feet I’d stop to listen to the muffled thwack of arrows hitting the dirt above me until my pickaxe finally hit something different—not the dull grey of limestone, but stone flecked with black, oily-looking chunks that felt like a gift from the universe. "Coal," I breathed, mining the vein with frantic energy before performing a little mental chemistry with a stick to produce a torch that finally chased the shadows away. Fwoosh. The cave glowed with a warm, flickering orange, and while it was beautiful, it was also incredibly depressing to finally see exactly how much dirt was under my square fingernails. I pulled out my crafting table and got to work, trading my flimsy wood for a stone pickaxe that felt balanced and cold, and a thick, heavy slab of sharpened rock that I called a sword. 3.

I spent the rest of the night in a fever dream of productivity, digging until my arms felt like lead and I had amassed stacks of cobblestone and coal, feeling less like a victim and more like a conqueror of geometry. Every swing of the pickaxe was a middle finger to the monsters waiting for me outside, and as I hollowed out the stone, I felt a strange sense of ownership over this blocky abyss. When I finally climbed my staircase back to the surface, I could see a faint, rectangular glow through the cracks in my dirt door, and the rattle of skeletons had been replaced by a satisfying sizzling sound that reminded me of breakfast. I broke the top dirt block and peered out to see the sun—that glorious yellow cube—rising over a beach covered in smoke and ash as the skeletons collapsed into piles of white powder. I stepped out onto the grass with my stone sword resting on my shoulder, squinting at the horizon and feeling significantly less like a snack than I had four hours ago. "Alright," I said, my stomach growling like a grinder full of gravel as I looked at the vast, pixelated wilderness. "Round two. I think I need a house, a sandwich, and to find out if the pigs in this neighborhood come in squares too." I didn't have a map or a plan, but I had a pocket full of rocks and a very sharp piece of stone, which was more than I had yesterday. The world was still square, the physics were still a joke, and I still didn't have elbows, but as I watched a blocky pig wander past a patch of rectangular flowers, I realized I was actually looking forward to seeing what else I could punch. Gary seemed to agree, or at least he stopped screaming, which I took as a ringing endorsement for my continued survival in this weird, cubic nightmare. Round two was officially starting, and this time, I wasn't just hiding in a hole; I was ready to build a kingdom, or at least a very sturdy shed where things couldn't teleport behind me. 4.