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.

"Crassus"