***

  Falco fastened the last of the ballast onto the deck of his airship. A wall of steam poured out of the sinkhole on their starboard side and stretched to the ever present layer of clouds above. A dense and lush rainforest covered everything to their port side. They sat sandwiched on the cliff’s edge between a wall of white and a wall of green.

  “Can’t you at least tell me where we’re going?” Finn hadn’t stopped his anxiety fueled line of questioning ever since they’d touched down and Falco had told him to gather up rocks and logs, anything with a weight to it, and help him strap it down to the deck.

  “You’ll see when we get there, my boy!”

  Finn made a frustrated sound and walked over the edge of the deck, facing the rainforest. He brought his arm up, took aim, and fired off a titanium spike that lodged itself several inches into a tree trunk thicker than three men across.

  Finn no longer looked surprised at the destructive strength of his projectiles. Falco remembered the first time he’d practiced shooting at trees. The kid had inspected the tree after his first shot for over half an hour. Falco smiled. Finn had even been reluctant to fire off another one, having grown some respect for his newfound power. Ah, the innocence of youth. Falco chuckled.

  Finn looked over at the sound of his laughing and his mood soured even further. “What’s all this for anyways? I doubt we’d be able to take off at all with this junk weighing us down.” He kicked a huge log tied to the checkered hatch leading below deck.

  Falco turned and surveyed the thickness of the steam clouds billowing out of the massive sinkhole. The rushing steam seemed to have calmed somewhat. They could leave soon. “We don’t need to take off.”

  “No?”

  “In fact, we need the opposite.”

  Finn flicked a nervous look towards the steam. “What do you mean?”

  “The steam makes it difficult to lower the altitude, the heavier we are, the shorter the journey. And trust me, my friend, we do not want this journey to be too long!” Falco laughed and slapped an increasingly alarmed Finn multiple times on the back.

  “The steam? You can’t mean— are we going down there?” Finn pointed to the wall of white.

  “Hahaha! So you figure it out at last.” The kid was smart, he just needed to shackle his fear. “Now, come help me push.” Falco walked over to a valve and released it. Gas hissed far above them into the balloon. Then he set course for the rope ladder leading down to the ground below them.

  “Push?”

  “Yes, my friend, push! How else will we get into the air, we are too heavy!”

  “But— but— who’s flying the ship if we’re on the ground pushing? Are you sure you’ve thought this through, Falco? How would we get back on again?”

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  “Why, we jump, of course!”

  Finn looked sick.

***

  Heimgaard looked like a bite sized village plastered to the side of a rocky hill, sticking out of the forest surrounding it. They’d followed the river the entire time. Isaac had wondered whether that was how Aster knew where to go, but she seemed just as surprised as him at seeing the river follow along. She must use some other way to navigate then.

  The huts on the hill were made out of stone and mud, square shaped and small. Several chimneys jutted out of houses here and there and columns of smoke drifted up to the sky. A wall that looked more like a mound of rock and dirt encircled the little village.

  A slim tower stood in the center and someone sitting atop it had already spotted them and waved. Aster waved back.

  “You do know these people right?” Isaac whispered.

  “Yeah, they’re one giant family, led by the mother, Inga.”

  Isaac’s skin crawled.

  Aster must’ve noticed because she continued. “Let me speak to her, okay? We’ll be out of there before you know it, with the information we need.”

  “Fine,” Isaac sighed, “I trust you, Aster.”

  Aster flinched slightly but didn’t speak further.

  Dwayne carried them up a winding path past jagged rocks all the way up to the perimeter wall. A sort of gate sat in the middle of the wall facing down the hill. It looked more like two enormous menhir, a large standing stone, had tipped over at the same time and struck each other half-way down and got stuck like that. Sure, it kind of worked as a gate, but Isaac wondered how they would close it, there was no door, just the two stones.

  They jumped off Dwayne and something made Isaac signal for Dwayne to wait outside. Much to his surprise, Dwayne listened. The large creature sat calmly and looked at him. Isaac remembered when he’d first met Dwayne the day before. The way Dwayne had moved like a wild animal, the uninhibited energy he had permeated. The eyes that gazed at him now portrayed not only an understanding of what Isaac wanted him to do, but also why he wanted him to do it.

  The last thing Isaac wanted was to scare these people. He didn’t know the first thing about them, except for the fact that they lived, and must have survived, in the Endpoint for some time. Not just lived here, they’d built their dwellings from mud and rocks rather than wood, and they’d built it on top of a hill instead of simply finding one of the many buildings left by the storms.

  They’d surrounded themselves with walls and they had a watchtower to look for arrivals. These people were cautious, that much Isaac could conclude just from the circumstances. Perhaps you had to be, to survive here. So he signaled for Dwayne to wait outside. It would be bad if Isaac got locked inside and separated from Dwayne, but hey, there was no door on the gate. And besides, he always had Aster to fall back on.

  They entered through the gate. A courtyard waited for them inside. Most of the houses formed a circle around the center of the village. A throng of people stood gathered in the courtyard around a huge pyre. A small figure lay atop it with a white cloth draped over it. Isaac’s throat tightened at the sight.

  The people’s attention wasn't on the pyre however, they focused on a woman surrounded by small critters talking with wild gesticulating motions to an older woman. The older woman had what looked like a strange cat on her shoulders.

  Isaac stepped to move closer. Something tickled his memory when he looked at those critters surrounding the agitated woman. Aster held out a hand and stopped him. She looked off to the side at the watchtower standing at the edge of the courtyard.

  A young kid swiveled down it like a fireman’s pole and positively bounced towards them. He had bowl cut hair so blonde it almost looked white and a very pale complexion. He reminded Isaac of a bouncing snowball.

  “Hey, Aster!” he said.

  “Hello, Birk.”

  “Why are you here?” The kid spoke with a scandinavian accent of some sort, Isaac couldn’t place exactly where.

  “I need to speak with Inga.”