Once they've killed the Ender Dragon, they retire to the lakeside. Emily builds a glass house and spends her days harvesting tulips from the superbloom over the next hill. She plants them around the front door, around the fenced-in yard, around the pen where James farms the pigs for slaughter.

James thinks the glass house is impractical. He hovers fifteen feet above the ground.

"Zombies will be able to see in at night," he points out, watching Emily fit the glass together above the bookshelves and storage units.

"But we can watch the sunset from inside," she says. "And we can see the flowers."

They push the twin beds together. At night, they both crawl in—like they're married—and laugh to themselves, on their backs, staring at the moving stars through the glass roof. They don't touch each other. They don't need it. They fall asleep like that.

James goes exploring when it's light. "You can come with me, you know," he says every day. Emily is usually happy to stay at the house, so he takes off alone with a pickaxe and a wooden breastplate. He's outfitted her in the best of their armor, given her the best of their weapons, so she gleams with a diamond light while she picks the flowers.

Sometimes he stays out too late, under the mountain or deep in the jungle, and Emily starts to worry. She doesn't like watching the sunset in the glass house if James isn't there. She takes her sword and picks her way through the hills to find him.

And James, wherever he is, can usually hear her coming. Funniest is when he hears a faraway scream, a fatal crunch, and the sound of his love being deposited back at their front door. He will tease her about this when he comes home, tired and hungry, and lies with her beneath the stars. Even better is when he hears a faraway scream, a fatal crunch, and the sound of his love coming quickly through the brush, blood on her sword and a smile on her face.

On some gold mornings, Emily whispers, "Don't leave today."

So he takes her on the boat. He paddles while she sits in the back, watching the hills, the flowers, the glass house disappearing. Their lake turns into a river, which turns into the ocean. There, James parks the boat and they jump into the water together. Sometimes there's a malicious squid and Emily swings herself back into the boat and demands to go home. And sometimes they stay there all day, splashing and swimming on their backs, watching the sun go down.

They can stay young in this world, if they want. No taxes to pay. No jobs to lose. No wrinkles and no gray hairs. In this world, they don't have kids to stretch Emily's skin or smear sticky hands across the glass walls. No wailing baby. No angry teenager.

One day, James asks, "Do you wish there was someone else, here, with us?" Emily nods. "The world is too big."

They tear down the glass house and kill all the farm animals. They destroy the crops and flowers. They take up into the air and sail for miles, watching the world pass beneath them, the jungles and the mountains, and they fly till the horizon breaks down, till it's just them, like the gods of this world, seeing beyond, making their great escape, and then it's all just lightness, forever.


.