“What happened?” he said.

“I don’t know.” She sounded worried. A hand grasped his and he let himself be dragged upright by Aster. How could she still move after that? He stood up, almost fell again, before he righted himself and surveyed their surroundings.

A small forest of feathers that reached to his knees had sprung up around him. He stood stunned and could only look and try to appreciate what had just happened. A gust of wind blew through and the feathers swayed in the breeze, moving as one. The ground almost looked like black it was so saturated with feathers sticking out of it.

“Where is he?” he asked. Aster pointed.

He looked to a mound of feathers that raised up higher than the surrounding ground. It could’ve been anything underneath there, a rock, some garbage or a piece of concrete. But as he looked closer, and it was hard to see in the sea of black, tiny outcroppings of a black robe could be spotted here and there between the feathers.

He looked at her. “What are you?” he asked. She looked back at him with intense sadness in her eyes but didn’t answer. For some reason Isaac felt he got his answer anyways through her face. Deep troughs ran through it, tracing lines from the edges of her face to a point somewhere on her nose. They were gray and dead-looking. In a few places it seemed small chunks of flesh had been torn out. If he looked underneath some of those feathers stuck into the ground all around him, would he find traces of human tissue? His skin prickled.

Something in his periphery moved and whatever he had been about to say died on his lips. He looked to the mound. It moved again.

He ran with every last bit of strength he could muster. Aster sidled along beside him and they were a pitiful sight indeed. His legs threatened to throw him to the ground and he caught Aster’s shoulder to steady himself. They were barely making any headway. The attempt was almost comical.

“This is insane!” Isaac felt like fainting. “How is he not dead?” Aster only grunted, focusing all her attention on putting one leg in front of the other. “He’s a fucking pincushion for Christ’s sake!”

Behind them, Crassus started screaming again.

Isaac felt it and heard it at the same time, the vibrations through the ground, the sounds of feathers snapping and breaking off. The dull thud of a footstep. “Oh god.” Isaac felt ghostly hands play across his back.

More footsteps, closer. It became hard to breathe. He would suffocate even before Crassus reached them. His shoulders sagged. Why refuse the inevitable. It would be so simple to lay down and rest at last. He regretted not finding Finn though, it would have been so good to see him one last time. To tell him he was sorry.

Thunder echoed through the ruins. Isaac opened his eyes. In under one second the smoke rushed in and reduced the visibility to a couple paces. The smoke breathed and pulsated like before, but something was very different this time. A strong wind blew through the smoke and a blue mist carried on it. The wind whipped the bubbles of smoke up like frothing water but the smoke did not drift even a hair's breadth away from where it had appeared.

Something enormous dropped a pace away and dirt and pebbles rained down on him. The ground shook and a deafening clatter started up as indistinguishable objects of every size and shape rained down. A wooden barrel dropped in front of him and broke. Horse shoes spilled out from it clinking an almost musical sounding tune.

Aster screamed something to him but the wind picked up and the roar in his ears drowned out all but the crash of the garbage and debris filling up every empty space and corner it could tumble its way into. He went to move closer to hear her better but as he turned he caught sight of something golden over her shoulder. It had only been for a brief moment, but Isaac knew beyond a sliver of a doubt what it had been. A face. The face of a man with blonde hair, a hesitant smile and kind eyes.

“FINN!”

He pawed his way past Aster and something hit his shoulder hard, pain radiating from it. He gritted his teeth and ignored it. He could see the outline of Finn through the haze running away from him. “FINN!”

A hand caught his elbow and attempted to haul him back. It was Aster, she screamed something at him, something about having to go, it was hard to make out. She pointed in a direction away from Finn. Couldn’t she leave him alone? Didn’t she realize that Finn was right over there? Did she understand what he had been through to get to this point? He wrenched his hand out of her grasp and she fell.

He looked back to Finn but the shape in the fog had disappeared. He cursed eternal suffering upon Aster and staggered after the memory he visualized in his mind. He had a general direction, and a sighting! Yes, this was enough. He would manage with this much, he had never even dared to dream of more than this.

His foot caught and he fell forward, face first in the dirt. He couldn’t lose the trail now. He had to get up. He clambered up but his feet knocked something into him. His foot hadn’t caught at all, he’d tripped on something.

He pushed to untangle his foot and a body rolled over, face up. Isaac froze. It was a man with a short stout build and a round puffy face. His skull caved in at the forehead. He had blonde hair, and maybe he had had a hesitant smile too, or even a kind expression, Isaac couldn’t tell now, but it wasn’t Finn.

A broken mirror lay next to him, shards of glass scattered about. Isaac looked into his reflection in a shard that leaned against the side of the man's face. Blood seeped down. The roar of the wind and the crash of the raining debris numbed his brain until he could think no more.

Aster caught up to him and crouched down beside him. She spared one glance at the broken face of the man splayed before them, then hauled at Isaac’s shoulder to get him up but he slumped further into misery.

The wind shifted. Instead of whipping at them from one direction it turned and Isaac felt his clothes tug in circles around him. The circle of wind grew and expanded past Aster a couple paces. Isaac looked into the wall of wind. It looked like a muddy grey mass of froth with blue streaks here and there. A memory prickled at the back of his mind.

The deafening roar lessened to a deep rumble.

“Don’t follow the people,” Aster said, breathing hard. “The debris falls…” She paused, “Where there’s… people.”

Isaac didn’t reply. He stared at the windwall. A memory of a car in a tornado sparked. His car. He turned around, but his throat caught as he saw the figure standing behind Aster, in the centre of the revolving wind.

He stood panting like Aster, feathers sticking out all over his body. Blood streamed down his ruined robes and the skin of his chest showed through the gaps in his chainmail. In his hand he held onto the edge of a bright white bathtub resting on the ground. Some pipes trailed behind it and a golden faucet reflected the dim blue light that seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at once.