Shattered Ladder 1-16

Chapter 2: Some Kind Scraps  A silent judgement sat on the horizon as Ken kept staring off at it, wind picking up low and sad through the scrap-fields. Dust flew far and high away from the village, a gray powder that could sometimes come packaged with a deadly payload; rust and glass and metal shavings…

Chapter 9: Three Years Still A thousand days.  Or something like it.  All of it was enough to smear together, one day blending into the next, in a long quiet period with no sharp edges to it.  The him that had been carried into this place, the tiny terrified twelve-year-old, was long-gone.  In that boy’s…

Chapter 1: A Rocky Start Thok! Rocks weren’t good for much.  Starting fires, grinding plants, maybe smashing things, sure. If you even went to all the trouble of sharpening it, you could tie it to a stick and then you had a good spear. But other than that, there wasn’t much you could do with…

Chapter 5: Free or Not? C’mon. There was apparently a thing called runner’s high. He remembered people talking about it before, way back when he lived in a world where people talked about stuff that was more than just about fighting, food and fixing things. He even remembered looking it up on the internet, just…

Chapter Three: A Rocky End The next day crawled by, the world the same gray smear that blended into the next. No books to read, nothing to watch, just simple work to do; going root-hunting for Sora and stripping what little scrap he could for salvage. It kept him busy, sure, but it was boring…