Chapter Two

Out of the Pan

Aster crept up behind the building and jumped back up to the roof again. Her clothes and feathered skin flowed through the air like leaves on the wind, not one rustle or sound escaped as she landed. She bent forward and hunkered up to the edge with an alligator’s gait. At the last bit of roof before the edge she stopped. She leaned her center of gravity further onto her arms until they were the only limbs supporting her. Then, she lowered her body to the roof, slow as a falling feather, until she lay flush with it. The top of her head peeked over the edge.

They were all still there. No one had followed her. Good. Ronan and his gang were circling that naive newcomer, Isaac. No doubt to blame him for her escape. There was nothing to blame, of course, he’d simply stumbled in at the worst possible moment. From her perspective the timing had been excellent. He’d been exactly the thing she’d needed to break Ronan’s dome of control and turn the odds in her favor. She almost couldn’t believe her fortune, she’d really been in a bind for a second there.

More birds flew up from the horizon, but closer this time.

Aster didn’t envy Isaac. What horrible luck. Out of all the starting points in the Endpoint, he’d received the Scrapyard, the domain of Crassus. More storms than usual occured in the Scrapyard. The place was so ravaged and stormtorn it crackled with destruction. Something was different about that place. The rifts were smaller but a lot more frequent. The real danger, however, was Crassus himself. According to the rumors he was an unstoppable force of destruction, impervious to any wound. He had gone so insane from overuse of bronze keys that he killed anyone and anything without a moment’s hesitation. To end up here was like finding a gold key for Isaac, one in a million.

Slight vibrations emanated from the roof up her fingers. The bickering men down on the ground didn’t appear to have noticed.

Not only had Isaac landed in the Scrapyard, he’d also dropped right into a standoff between a gold key and Tejahl’s bandits. Well, she didn’t actually have her key at the moment. But that would soon be rectified. She eyed the bandits while they bullied Isaac. Oh yes, it would be, very soon.

Her plan was to wait until Crassus had killed off the bandits below. Then she’d come down from her hiding place once Crassus had wandered off again, and she could collect Tejahl’s quota of silver keys from Tejahl’s own bandits. The plan was so beautiful and satisfying Aster could hardly keep herself from grinning.

That would mean Isaac died as well of course. Unfortunate, but there wasn’t really anything she could do about that. She’d learned long ago that certain people couldn’t survive the Endpoint in the long run. She knew a squealer when she saw one, and Isaac, now that was a squealer. If the bandits didn’t kill him, Crassus would. No one escaped Crassus. She bit her lip. Yeah, she’d do well to remember that herself. Overconfidence was a slow and insidious killer.

The vibrations grew to a shaking. The men continued their bickering, gesturing to Isaac, their voices raised, talking in a language Aster didn’t understand. Not one of them looked towards the dust clouds forming in the distance. The fools, they deserved to die then. Or, now that she looked closer at him, Isaac did look a fraction more frightened. Maybe he had a better instinct than she gave him credit for. The muscles in his neck strained as if to resist the temptation to look behind him at all costs.

She felt a grudging speck of respect for his resolve. But then he cowered before Ronan again and the illusion was gone. Maybe he planned to use Crassus as a distraction and use that to escape the bandits somehow. There was one major drawback to his plan, though. He didn’t know what was coming. He didn’t know that Crassus was not something you could use as a distraction. Not if you were as weak as Isaac. That was his real crime, not his plan, or his ignorance, his weakness was what made Aster’s stomach twist. So weak. They were all weak.

The vibrations grew until she could feel each footstep. Then she could hear them, each step sounded like a boulder crashing into the earth. She heard wood breaking apart, rock against rock. A tree peeking above the buildings was pushed down like she would push away a branch in her path. Her eyes bulged at the sight. How large had that tree been? For a moment she doubted her sense of scale. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. Sweat dripped onto her chin from her eyebrow. Maybe she should get away while she still could.

Ronan’s head snapped to a brick building separating them and Crassus’s approach. Isaac yelped and scooted away on his back, paddling with his arms as Ronan barked out some orders. The surviving bandits fanned out into a formation. The thundering footsteps built until they came like rain, then ceased abruptly. A resounding crash shook the ground and her building with it. Aster braced herself against the roof.

A large boulder exploded out from the brick wall and hurled debris in a wide arc like bullets, whipping up the ground to a frothing mass of dust and chipped fragments, filling the air. One large brick flew into the building right below Aster’s lookout but she resisted her instinct to jump up and glide away. Several more pieces of debris halted in mid-air and fell to the ground, coming to rest in a semi-circle before Ronan and some of the bandits.

The smaller pieces stopped before Ronan’s outstretched hand, but not the boulder, it hurtled right into their formation. Two bandits vanished from sight and the large rock erupted into thousands upon thousands of tiny pieces that peltered every surface they could reach. This time, only the projectiles heading for Ronan stopped in the air. The rest of the hurtling rock found their marks. Spurts of red joined the grey and brown chaos. A severed arm sailed past Aster— flipping and turning in the air around and around through the forming dust clouds and out of sight.

Crassus leapt through the wreckage left behind by the boulder, landed on the ground, braced himself, then shot out like an arrow. He took the closest bandit at the mid section with an outstretched hand and the bandit just… ruptured. He fell apart like a piece of rotten fruit, large chunks of him splattering across the terrain, some of it up Crassus’s arm. Intestines flowed out like rope and the torso spun in the air, entangling itself in itself.

Crassus lowered a bloodsoaked arm. He wore long robes over a bronze chainmail made up of keys in place of iron rings. He had hair and beard that went down to his stomach. His face looked drained and tired. But most disconcerting were his eyes: sunken sockets, white irises, glossed over and opaque pupils. He looked like he should be in a coffin, not standing up.

He turned and his gaze met Aster’s. She gasped, despite trying not to. He looked straight at her. She’d been discovered, just like that.

Aster held his eyes for three nerve-wracking seconds, unable to will her body into action, but then he looked away and he locked eyes with Ronan instead. Crassus crouched down then shot out like an arrow, head first, arms at his side. He moved so fast his form blurred and Aster barely had time to register that he had jumped. Ronan on the other hand reacted at once. He roared in defiance and brandished his arm and a blinding light flashed from his hand.

An invisible force grabbed hold of Crassus midair. He slowed imperceptibly but in contrast to all the times Ronan had stopped the other projectiles, Crassus did not stop. The kinetic energy did appear to siphon away from Crassus through Ronan’s key but there seemed no end to it, Crassus just kept coming. The dust clouds surrounding him blasted away. The ground beneath him quaked and smaller pebbles burst.

Ronan tried again and a larger shockwave emerged from Crassus. The ground cracked and a large circle split off from the rest of the packed earth and was pushed down several centimeters. Crassus slowed to a crawl and he brought his legs forward and stepped down into the crater Ronan had made for him.

For a brief moment he did nothing. Ronan staggered and steadied himself against his knees. He breathed hard.

Then a truly twisted and demented look came over Crassus’s face, like all the rage in the whole world had take refuge within him and now bubbled out. He screamed like a rabid animal and crouched to jump once more. Ronan cursed and brought up his hand before Crassus could take off.

At the exact moment Crassus jumped, Ronan reached out and forced the kinetic energy away from his movement into the air and ground around him. The earth burst as if struck by a concrete pillar ten paces across. Everything not already flat shattered and compacted in a fraction of a second, three bodies of some unfortunate bandits spurted up like geysers as if they had been passed through a juicepress.

Finding nowhere else to go, the energy traveled through the connection between Crassus’s jump and Ronan’s key. Aster saw the skin on Ronan’s face ripple as the shockwave of kinetic energy traveled through him to reach the ground and a similar but smaller circle exploded up around Ronan.

The light emanating from Ronan’s hand dimmed and the very next instant Ronan blasted off backwards, crashing into Aster’s building. As he hit the building another circle, far larger than the other ones, smashed down around Ronan, right onto Aster, like a judgement from god. It flattened the whole building along with the area as the brick structure crumpled like a cardboard box.

Aster felt like she had been crushed by a landslide from both sides. The whole fight between Ronan and Crassus had taken no more than three seconds. This is insane. Ronan was the strongest fighter she knew, and the main reason she couldn’t have defeated Tejahl’s bandits herself. Stand up, stand up! The panic was impossible to push down now. She groaned as it engulfed her. I don’t want to die! The thought, or perhaps the panic, or maybe both, forced her into action. She stood up, Crassus already knew she was there, no use in pretending.

Only she, Crassus and Isaac were still alive. Everyone else was either ripped apart, squished to smush, or buried under a building. Debris lay strewn about everywhere. Dust choked the air. Mutilated corpses scattered the ground and a corridor of destruction stretched out from behind Crassus in through the hole in the wall where he’d made his entrance.

Crassus made no move. He was a very tall man, with the complexion of a corpse. Now that he was closer, Aster could see from inside his cloak the myriad of identical bronze keys interlocked at their handles to form the chainmail going around Crassus’s body. It hung down well past his stomach. Aster struggled to take in what she was seeing. There must be hundreds of keys in that chainmail. No wonder he’s so strong… and he’s insane.

She met his eyes. In between all that hair and set against his white and pallid skin two sunken eye sockets sat peering back at her. He looked like misery and death. His eyeballs were huge and misty white and they reflected the carnage around him as if nothing could quite penetrate them. He tilted his head slightly and for a second it seemed as if he was looking straight at her. In that moment, Aster knew she was dead. How could she have been so naive? In her own hubris she’d sealed her fate the moment she’d stepped into this place.

But she didn’t die—Crassus continued until his head was turned towards the other survivor of the group. Isaac lay bunched up against a large piece of debris, clutching at the ground as if it could save him if only he held on hard enough. The whites of his eyes bulged against his eye sockets and specks of blood coated his skin and clothes. Isaac met the gaze of Crassus, then trembled and made the sounds of a man who looked death in the eyes.

Crassus stood like a towering cliff, unmoving and overpowering. But then a tremor went through him and his body language melted into that of a quivering, confused mess of a man. He hunched his shoulders and clutched his face in his hands. Aster was unsure of whether he was trying to gouge his skin or protect it. His eyes darted from body to body and he moaned each time he spotted a new body like they were each the corpse of his child after a house fire.

His nervous ticks grew more frantic. Aster found it difficult to breathe. This new behaviour disturbed her more than the last. The man was beyond insanity. How could a person go so fast from inhuman rage to… whatever this was? Not one person present had any control of the situation, least of all Crassus. The sensation of a thousand crawling insects itched across her skin.

The mad ravings reached a crescendo. Something was coming. Aster had no idea what that something would be, but she prepared for another explosion of deranged violence. She drew on the last of her reservoir of feathers from her key out through her skin and fell into a stance which settled her point of gravity lower to the ground.

Crassus wasn’t even looking at anything in particular anymore, he just wildly shifted between empty points in space as if they were all surrounded by invisible enemies only he could see. He brought his head around so fast he stumbled forward and Isaac whimpered. Crassus stopped at the sound yet another shift went over his mood.

He held out his hands to Isaac imploringly, almost longingly. Isaac shivered as if he sat in a blizzard and tried to press himself further away from Crassus into the stone behind his back. His skin stretched taught across the features of his face like a thousand year old parchment. Crassus’s mouth opened but only something like the rasping sounds of a man three days lost in a desert came out. He cleared his throat and tried again.

“Please, I need it, just… please!”

Aster’s jaw slackened and she completely forgot herself. “You can talk?”

Crassus carried on as if he couldn’t hear her. “Please, I beg you, just lend it to me, just for one second, I need it.” He rambled on without pause, stumbling through different variations of “please” and “give it to me”.

Aster had no idea what was going on, Crassus was acting far more crazy than what the many stories about him had let on. She’d never even heard of Crassus doing anything other than killing. She reeled. Just seconds ago she was frightened for her life because of this man splitting humans down the middle with his bare hands. Now he lay on his knees rambling, no begging, for something neither she nor Isaac had even the faintest clue about.

She shook herself. This was an opportunity, and an opportunity best not forsaken. If she didn’t act now she might never act again.

Discs of light bloomed outwards from her hands in rapid succession. The small explosions were not loud but the foreign sounds they made might as well have come from avalanches for how they disrupted the eerie silence. She hesitated. She formed a few more shockwaves away from her, first to her left side, then to her right. No reaction. She danced nervously on the tips of her feet.

Aster dove headfirst into a charge with reckless abandon. A large shockwave blossomed out beneath her, shoving her feet hard up into the air. She gritted her teeth and strained her muscles to keep her body upright. Right at the precipice of the arc, about three metres in the air, she hung for a brief second rather than falling back to earth. She slightly tilted her torso forward and let herself tip over and fall.

Her body fell forwards until she was perpendicular to the ground below, then another blast exploded from behind her and propelled her forward. Hair and clothes rippled against her body as the air around her was forced away. Right before she hit Crassus she tucked her legs in under her stomach and held her palms up aimed squarely at his back. Two balls of light exploded out from her palms, far larger than anything she had produced up until then.

Crassus’ body stood untouched, as if the light and the shockwaves went right through him. But his chainmail of keys was not so lucky. It bulged outward as if a giant soap bubble was growing underneath it. The interlocked keys strained at their breaking point for a tenth of a second. Aster strained as the bones in her arms were also brought to a breaking point as her upper torso were brought to a complete halt then thrown back around the other way in an instant. Her legs however continued on their trajectory and once again Aster blasted a shockwave out from her feet, so huge it hid her feet from view completely. Every visible surface was bathed in light so bright it made everything appear white.

The keys broke. The sounds of something like coins pouring into a tin can filled her ears as a river of keys flooded out from his chest all over the ground and Isaac. They flowed like a stream from a faucet made for keys rather than water.

Crassus moaned in desperation and clutched at his stomach. He clawed at the keys as they fell out of him, desperately trying to catch them, but they merely flew through his hands as if they had no mass. Isaac clambered in full panic as far away from Crassus as he could muster. Which wasn’t very far as his retreat was blocked by the large piece of concrete wall he was pushing his back against.

Crassus began mopping all the keys on the ground with the flat of his forearm into a pile. Aster, still hovering after having pushed herself high into the air with the blast against Crassus’s back, let herself drop. She couldn’t really believe her stunt had worked as well as it had and found she hadn’t ever considered what she would do next if it did. She quickly discovered however that she could have spared herself the effort because Crassus soon made the choice for her. As she landed his head jerked up at the noise and he plunged his hand into the earth next to him.

In a movement so fast it blurred from one motion to the next he whipped his hand up and behind him, through the earth and rock as if it was a liquid and not a solid matter.

“Stay still!” he screamed.

Aster’s body moved on its own accord before her brain had quite registered what was happening. She felt herself drop back and the fear rise along her spine as her view filled in with sky and then the spray of rock and dirt a mere hand’s breadth away from her face. There was no way to recover from her limbo pose so she kicked off with her feet so her body was fully airborne and drew forth another shockwave beneath the soles of her feet. She launched away from Crassus and Isaac through the air.

Every instinct in her adrenaline-wrecked body told her to get away fast and get away far, far from this place and the inhuman beast that occupied it. She tried to bring her hands forward over her face but they moved unbearably slow and in a wild moment she believed Crassus must have some ability to slow down time itself. But the moment passed and she blew two small bursts behind her which whipped her body upright and she sent a blast beneath her with all her might.

Something large passed under her feet and the wind pressure knocked her off course. A panic the likes of which she had never felt before threatened to drown out her mind. Only a raw animalistic survival instinct let her manage to cling on to consciousness. She drew out every single one of her remaining feathers from her skin and hurled them down, without even bothering to take aim.

As her speed faltered the panic came surging back and she dropped a few meters before she could focus her full attention on her grip on gravity and her mass. She hovered in the air, only dropping by the length of a finger for every second. Only then did she spare the time to look down.

Crassus and Isaac were hard to make out beneath all the dust and debris flying around in the air. Isaac appeared to be clutching an arm and Crassus seemed to be working up a fury. Sweat rolled down her forehead and into her eye. She blinked. Crassus hurtled towards her. One moment he was hazy and distant on the ground, the next he was clear as day and had closed half the distance between them in one jump.

She moved to blast herself out of his path but he was already behind her. He had missed her somehow. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him raise his hand far above her but she couldn’t see if he was holding something. He made a throwing motion and she fought the instinct to close her eyes. Nothing struck her however and she turned around in the air until she had her back to the ground. Confused she waited for something to happen. Then a sudden wind battered against her. The wind blindsided her completely and for a brief second she lost her hold on gravity. She only gained a bit of speed but that was all it took, she struggled with all her might against the acceleration but it was futile. She went down hard.

She reached inside her cloak and gripped her fingers around a keychain with four keys hanging from it. The handle of one key circled through the handle of another as if they had been wrought together, just like how the keys on Crassus’s chainmail linked with each other. Aster’s hands closed around the lower key and she yanked hard. At first both handles held, metal against metal but then the lower key simply melted around the first key. The silver form shivered and spilled out into a misshapen mess, let the still solid handle of the first key pass through, then, as if it somehow knew it had arrived on the other side, reformed. The original shape materialized out of the melted silver, just as it had been before.

She clutched the key in a tight fist and screamed in defiance. A metallic sheen spread along her skin out from her hand and down her arm. With a crash she landed on the piece of concrete Isaac had cowered against moments earlier. It cracked and split down the middle, with the crumpled body of Aster resting in the middle but no blood spilled from her.

With gritted teeth and her face caked in powdered concrete she propped herself up on her elbows and sought out Isaac. He lay sprawled right next to one of the now two concrete slabs having barely escaped being squashed twice after having dived for cover when Aster came flying and again when the slab split from her impact.

“Distract him.” Aster said.

He looked scared and confused. “How?” he said, his apprehension showing.

“Like you did earlier,” Aster said, she meant to say more, to encourage him. But she struggled to gather enough air to form the words and her patience evaporated. “If you had actually talked to him last time, kept him going, maybe my ribs wouldn’t be cracked right now.” She glared at him, all the while attempting to get up and out from between the slabs.

The insult seemed to stir him out of his shock a bit. “Talk? To that guy? He’s completely insane! What’s with all this, ‘I have something of his?’ How could I have anything that belongs to him? I bloody well just got here!”

Aster wanted to pin him full of feathers like a cushion. “Just, lead him on like last time, entertain him, tell him what he wants to hear.” She tried once again to get onto her feet but her vision faded inwards and she collapsed back. Bile rose up her throat.

“How the hell would I know what he wants!” Isaac shouted, “He’s out of his mind!” He sounded just as exasperated as she felt. “Besides, why should I help you, you left me, remember?” The color in his skin was fully flushed now, in contrast to the sickly white color he’d sported ever since Crassus’s arrival.

A thud sounded off in the distance as Crassus touched down onto solid earth once more. Aster’s heart rate spiked back up to borderline panic attack levels again.

“Listen to me, you do it or we both die!” Panic and fury laced her voice. “Do you hear me?”

Isaac opened his mouth, ready to argue back but all that came out was a shout of surprise as a rock shattered against the top of a slab and scattered chipped fragments everywhere, showering Isaac in gravel.

Aster cursed and the metallic sheen returned to her arm, engulfing the skin. She punched out as the next rock came flying. She screamed, eyes bulging as the stone split into pieces. The chunks zipped past her, one striking her forehead and she gasped. Her sight blinked out for a brief second but through the memory of her surroundings she dove for cover. If she couldn’t stand upright, she at least could fall somewhere, maybe it would be enough.

The slab to her left trembled beneath her thigh and she heard a loud crack as a third rock connected right where her upper body would have been had she not moved. But her hand still trailed behind her and she felt a numbing sensation travel up it. Had she kept the armament, or was her arm now crushed? In the haze of everything having happened so fast, she could not recall. She held her hand up in front of her face and she could see it fully, but for some reason it wouldn’t register in her mind whether it was crushed or not.

What did register however was in the background, through the rockdust she could see the outline of Crassus. He pounded the earth in pure rage with such violence that his form was almost obscured by the dirt he was kicking up. Something or other in his insanity fueled fury must’ve offended him and now had to pay the price of distracting him. Maybe he stubbed his toe. The surrealness of the mental image almost made her laugh out loud.

Someone far, far away shouted at her… or maybe it was close? She could feel the tremors. Wait, no that was Crassus having his temper tantrum. Someone was trying to gain her attention. She looked to her side. A man stood there and shouted, he was saying the same thing, over and over. What was his name again? Ike? Zack?

“Get up! Move! Please, for the love of god, just get up!”

Oh… right… that. She thought. Aster pushed herself up from the ground with her right hand but the rest of her body didn’t respond fast enough as she tried to stand and she almost toppled over. Her left hand shot up to steady herself against the slab behind her. As her hand clutched around the edge of the concrete an unbelievable pain seared through every nerve-ending in her upper body.

The pain jolted her brain awake again but her grip slid right off the slab as if it was soaked in something slippery. Gravel pierced her chin and pinched her cheekbones as her face hit the ground with a sickly wet thud. She braced herself to get up before even considering the new pain. Her right side felt as if a bandage full needles had been wrapped around it.

A hand gripped her shoulder and she looked up in time to see Isaac bend over her and grab her ruined hand as well. For a second, all she knew was pain as he heaved her body up and onto her two trembling feet. She wanted to thank him but pure instinct instead made her shove him hard with her one good hand. Using the momentum from the push she let herself fall once more. Only this time she let loose a shockwave of power beneath her before she could hit the ground.

Not a second later she saw Crassus slam into the slabs, one foot on each slab, hard enough to make them tilt up from the ground a bit before they settled again. His upper body curved against his feet as he fought the momentum. Aster twisted in the air before she landed, making sure her good side faced down. She clutched her wounded arm with her good one to secure it from striking the ground as she skidded to a halt.

Mucus and bile forced its way up her throat. She heaved it out in long slow convulsions, each contraction sending waves of pain down her body. The contractions slowed but still every breath seethed with agony. She found herself slumping towards the ground. To her surprise she saw more blood than bile between her hands. The realization made her feel something, but she couldn’t decide what. It was somehow important. Something to do with Crassus. She searched for him. He stood with his back to her, crouched over Isaac, who sat covering his face. Crassus took Isaac’s arm and forced it down. That was all she saw before darkness rushed in at the edges of her vision. It consumed the world and all stilled, at last she could rest. She welcomed oblivion.