“I noticed,” Adrissu said, unsure if he should press the issue more. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Again Pollux was silent for a long moment—but then, much to Adrissu’s shock, he covered his face with his hands as if he were trying not to cry.
“I never sleep well,” he choked out, curling in on himself. “For as long as I can remember. I’m always tired. I have these—these dreams—memories of my past lives. I hate it. It feels like I never truly rest. It’s why I can’t just be idle. I have to be working, or it’s too much to bear. I’m so tired, Adrissu, I’mso tiredof all this. I don’t want to be in this cycle anymore. I don’t think I could handle another life’s worth of memories rolling around in my head like this. It gets more intense every time. I remember being Kian and hating it already—and it’s worse now, Adrissu, it really is.”
Shell shocked, Adrissu couldn’t come up with a response for a long while, staring at Pollux—a strange mixture of despair and hope and sympathy and shame roiling in his chest all at once.
“I…” he started, then shook his head. “Of course. You know I’ll do everything in my power to help you, Pollux. I already have a plan, or at least an idea of what we can do. That is—if you mean the soul transference.”
Pollux’s expression darkened, but he didn’t reply. Whatever that meant, Adrissu was unsure, so he added cautiously, “Is that what you meant?”
“I don’t know,” Pollux sighed, looking away. “Last time, I... When I wanted to try it, that was when everything... happened. I don’t want to die. Not like that.” His hands unconsciously moved to his sides as he spoke—for an instant, Adrissu had a flash of Kian, reaching for his shattered ribs in his last moments. He looked away, blinking hard, until Pollux spoke again. “You said you have a plan?”
“Yes,” Adrissu said, his voice rasping. He cleared his throat. “The red dragon, Tyrsun—he’s a menace. I knew his parents. I thought he would be a good candidate even before I spoke with them, but when they asked for my help in getting him to... behave a little less petulantly, I was much more certain.”
Pollux’s face twisted in consternation, finally breaking through his miserable expression. “Really? Him?Really?”
Despite himself, Adrissu laughed and nodded. “I think he’s the best option, really. Close enough that we can scope out his lair, and no one will be upset if he stops coming around. He has no friends, no allies, even for a dragon. Getting rid of him will do a service to the people of Wintergrove, as well as working for our own purposes.”
“I see,” Pollux said, though he sounded unconvinced. “I don’t know if I like the idea of... taking over Tyrsun’s body. But I suppose if you think it is our best option, I have no alternatives, so I’ll have to trust you.”
Adrissu paused, then placed a hand on Pollux’s fists, which were clenched over his knees. “I do want you to trust me, but if you want me to find a different dragon, I will. It will be your body. If you would prefer something else...”
Pollux shook his head. “I don’t want to think that hard about it. It still makes me nervous to even entertain the notion.”
“I won’t let this be a repeat of last time, I promise. I’ve thought about it much more already. We’ll have a better plan. We won’t be rushing the way we did then. That will make all the difference.”
Pollux’s expression didn’t change, but he nodded silently. His gaze was still vacant, looking listlessly out the front window. Adrissu leaned down and kissed his forehead, and he looked back up at Adrissu with a tiny, weary smile. “I trust you.”
The words thrummed underneath Adrissu’s skin, filling him with warmth. Coming from Pollux, that very well may have been an ardent declaration of love. “Thank you. I promise I won’t let you down.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Despitehiswords,Polluxalmost immediately seemed to backtrack, coming to Adrissu the next day to tell him not to act too rashly on his behalf.
“I have a long life ahead of me yet,” he said, carefully expressionless. “I want to... Well. I might not be making a dragon-slaying weapon anymore, but I still want to be more prepared than last time. I’ll work on things that can help us when we eventually deal with Tyrsun.”
“Say the word, and I’ll be ready,” Adrissu sighed. “But if you prefer to wait, I won’t rush you.”
“I know,” Pollux said, and neither of them said anything else on the matter.
Pollux kept himself busy with his new workshop, and Adrissu came to see him sometimes, but mostly tried to let him tinker away undisturbed. Pollux had a few ideas for things that could subdue a dragon, but nothing worth showing yet. Adrissu knew not to rush him; and besides, he had plenty of his own work to keep him busy, between the school and his own renewed study of soul transference. He knew how the soul transference worked, of course, but it had been over a century since he’d successfully performed it last, and it wasn’t something he wanted to be unsure of when the time finally came. So he re-read all his notes about it, tried it a few more times with some chickens he bought from one of the outlying farms, and spent some time trying to sort out what had happened to the stone containing Lorsan’s soul, which had shattered unexpectedly about a hundred years after he had contained the soul therein.
What he could deduce was that putting a soul into a container, rather than another living creature, would cause it to decay over time—or at least, something akin to decay. He did not fully understand it, but it seemed to be contingent on both the size of the vessel and the complexity of the soul; the tiny chicken souls he pulled out fit neatly in small shards of precious stones, but within a few months those small gems would be cracked or split entirely with no evidence left of the soul inside it.
Luckily, he did not anticipate needing to put his mate’s soul into anything other than a dragon body for longer than a few moments, and he did not especially care what happened to the soul of the other dragon when he took it out. Some part of him thought it might be interesting to see what would happen if he put the dragon’s soul into Pollux’s body, but it would be a dangerous gamble—and besides, he felt quite sure that Pollux would be against it for one reason or another. So he sorted through his hoard, a monumental task in itself, and found two suitable gems that he set aside to perform the ritual at a moment’s notice.
It was during this time that Alana Pughes died. She was getting old for a human, but her death was not a natural one; she was killed in an accident involving a steam tank, part of a project that she was working on to improve the steam engine transport that ran along the southern coast. An overfilled tank exploded, killing her and some others working near it, and injuring several more. It was very unfortunate, and Adrissu wondered if the tank being overfilled was actually an accident, or if someone was vying for her position and plotted this lethal removal; but no evidence of wrongdoing was found, and his suspicion wasn’t strong enough to investigate the matter himself.
“Didn’t they ask you to become Lord Representative once?” Pollux asked when Adrissu was recounting the gory affair to him a few days after it happened, since the elf had been sequestered in his workshop since the day before it occurred.
“Oh, a few times now,” he laughed, shaking his head. “I considered it when they first asked me about it, when the Federation first took over and set up the position, but, well. I figured someone would eventually notice that their Lord Representative hadn’t died or aged at all, and that would be a complicated issue to traverse, don’t you think? Far more trouble than it’s worth.”
“When the Federation took over,” Pollux echoed, his eyes becoming distant. He frowned, as if trying to think of something.
“Do you remember when that happened?” Adrissu asked cautiously, and Pollux’s frown only deepened.
“It sounded familiar somehow, but... no, I don’t think so. I was... there for that?”
