“What does it do?”

“It lets you turn part of yourself into its aspect.”

“So the feathers are a part of you?”

She smiled at him like he was getting it now. “No.”

“Wha—”

“—the feathers aren’t part of me, they are created by the key.”

“Then how come you can make the feathers part metal?”

Her smile widened even further and she leaned closer like she was about to reveal the big secret. “See that’s the magic of it all, each key can connect to any other… and they will interact with the key they’re connected to instead of you!”

The different possibilities Isaac had been building inside his mind suddenly multiplied. His eyes widened.

“Just watch.” She took the armament key and pulled it hard. At first the circular handle only clinked against the metal of the other key, but then the inner circle melted and one ring passed through the other until Aster held two separate keys in her hand rather than one bundle.

“Wow...” Isaac couldn’t help but be amazed. “The metal melts on its own to let one key pass through the other? How does it know you want to seperate them?”

“You just pull.” She said it like it should be obvious.

She put the key she had just freed back on the chain around her neck. She held up her hand between them. Isaac watched in amazement as the hand in front of his face turned silver. A large spot of blank iron sprouted out from a spot on the back of her hand. It grew like ice on a lake, except it started from the middle rather than the edges.

“What is that one called?”

“Armament, with the iron aspect.”

She pulled off the feather key and hooked it into the armament key dangling from her chain. She closed her eyes, concentrating, and a large black feather grew from her hand.

Isaac felt perplexed. “Now the feathers have no iron on them, but you connected the feather key to the iron key, shouldn’t it do something?”

Aster opened her eyes and looked at him with the patience of a wisened mentor. “Look where it grows from.”

Isaac looked towards the base of the feather. It stuck out from the metal on her hand. “Oh!” He looked up at her, he felt the excitement from before return ten-fold. “So normally you can only manifest the feathers from your own skin, but by connecting it through the iron key you can do so from the metal as well.”

She nodded. “Yes, that’s right. This way I can attack and defend at the same time.” She laughed. “Though I prefer more firepower so I connect the armament key to the projectile key rather than the other way around.”

“Then how do you protect yourself?” Isaac remembered her previous fights, she’d been far too reckless by his estimation.

“Just don’t get hit, Isaac,” she winked at him.

He had nothing to say to that, so he just stared at her.

She grew a bit flustered beneath his stare. Maybe she wasn’t all that accustomed to praise or admiration.

She looked off to the side over her shoulder and waved her hand in the air as if to downplay his unspoken compliments. “Besides, there’s also the much greater drawback that to fire, I first need to create my armament, which takes time and mass. It’s much simpler to create and fire one thing than to go through two layers of concentration before I can attack.”

“Mass?”

“Yes, one can only create a certain amount of mass per hour, up until a maximum limit of mass per twenty-four hours.”

Isaac couldn’t stop feeling amazed at everything Aster told him. This just went on and on, how much did she know and how had she figured it all out? He needed to get every ounce of information he could out of this person. “How do you know how much you can create in a given period?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “By practicing and testing your limits, I guess. Most newcomers can’t produce much more than their body per hour though, that at least seems to be consistent.”

Isaac blinked. “So if you weigh more you can create more?”

Now Aster was the one to hesitate. “Huh, I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it like that before. It doesn’t really matter though, no matter what amount you can create to begin with, practice far outpaces that amount in a matter of days.”

“Of course it matters, you could gain weight on purpose in addition to practicing, leveraging your results on both axises simultaneously.”

Aster looked at him like he was the dumbest person to walk the Endpoint. “Have you looked around yourself lately? There’s not much food to go around in these parts.” she shook her head. “I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but most people who come here starve to death. The rest get their throats slit and their keys stolen by Tejahl and their ilk.”

Isaac swallowed. He started speaking, then choked and changed course. “Where the soldiers who killed the people from the train with Tejahl too?”

Aster still looked angry but her voice calmed somewhat. “No, they’re with Kin Tao. The current warlord who rules around these parts.”

“Tejahl and Kin Tao? How many warlords are there?”

“Just the two of them. Though Tejahl isn’t really a warlord in the same way Kin Tao is.”

“What, is she less ruthless than Kin Tao?”

Aster chuckled. “Oh, no, she’s plenty ruthless alright,” she sounded bitter, “she just has control of the tower. No key powers work there for some reason, so Kin Tao can’t really attack her there, even though he’s stronger.”

Isaac thought this new information over for a while. “How does she control the tower if no key powers work there, does she have a different kind of power?” At this point Isaac wouldn’t put anything past this new reality he found himself in. He was ready to accept anything, no matter how outlandish it sounded.

“The key powers don’t work, but the resonance still does.”

“The resonance?”

“You’ve seen me use it.”

Isaac thought back. Only a second went by before it clicked. “The shockwaves, the discs of light!” She nodded. He felt his mind slip back into the usual intuitive leaps and quick pattern recognition he’d grown so accustomed to through his investigative work. Sleeping had really helped him regain his old self. He’d been useless for far too long.