Violence might be the only path forward now, he thought, but he would try one last-ditch effort to leave quietly. Ducking into an alleyway as if he were looking for a back door, Adrissu returned to his usual elven form, looped around the building, and came out the other side before striding through the main entrance. A few guards were gathered around a table to his left, talking to each other and glancing up as he entered; but he ignored them and stepped to the right, where a guard was posted in front of a closed iron door.
“Is this the entrance to the jail?” he asked the man standing guard, who blinked dumbly at him for a moment, before stammering out an answer.
“Yes,” the man said, perplexed. “State your business.”
“I am Adrissu Rolastra, and an elf named Pollux Blackthorn is being held in a jail cell. I have permission from the Lord Representative to come collect him.”
He slid his hand into a pocket of his robe, and with a small flourish of illusion magic, held out a piece of parchment with a short missive. The guard frowned down at it, but before he could reach and examine it further, Adrissu pulled it away and stuck his hand back in his pocket.
“I mean—this is not standard procedure, sir,” the guard said, running a hand through his hair anxiously.
“I understand,” Adrissu replied, then added in a lower voice, “Do you know why that man is in there?”
“I heard that he...” the guard stammered. His eyes flickered between Adrissu and the guards sitting on the other side of the room. “That he was the one who turned into a dragon and went on a rampage through the city.”
Adrissu forced himself not to roll his eyes—a few buildings being damaged was hardly a rampage.
“That’s right,” he said coolly. “He’s dangerous. I’m the headmaster of the Academy of Magic. I know how to hold him safely—you think iron bars and stone walls would be enough to stop him if he really wanted to get out?”
The man frowned at that, looking frightened. “Well... yes, that makes sense. Alright. One moment.” He pulled a ring of keys from his belt and turned to unlock the door behind him.
As the handle clicked, and the man pushed open the metal door, the entrance Adrissu had first come through burst open behind them. Adrissu swore under his breath as everyone turned to look at the guard who had just come sprinting through, red in the face and panting.
“An—An attack,” he stammered between heaving breaths, his attention on the guards on the other side of the room. “At the Lord Representative's estate—they say that—that Captain Dane is—is dead!”
“What?!” the other guards exclaimed, leaping to their feet.
Adrissu took his chance while they were distracted—he shoved past the guard and slammed the metal door closed behind him, clicking the lock into place.
“Hey!” he heard them shout, muted behind the door. “Get back here!” He heard the key rattle in the handle again, but he shoved his full weight against the door and pressed his hand to where it met the doorframe, filling his palm with fire. The heat seared at the metal, but it would take a long moment to weld them together.
“Who’s there?” he heard a man shouting from behind him—he’d barely had the chance to even look at the room he was now in. Glancing back with his hand still heating the doorframe, Adrissu spotted a guard drawing his sword and walking up to him from across a long hallway. Behind the guard, Adrissu could see a row of metal bars—the jail cells.
“Come on, come on,” Adrissu hissed, turning his attention back to the door. The metal was softening under his hand as he tried to push the two separate pieces together. He could hear the nervous guard stammering from the other side,
“It’s not working—I don’t know what he’s doing!”
“Hey!” the guard in the hallway shouted again, now running toward him. “Stop that!”
“Stay away from me!” Adrissu warned, but the man did not stop his approach. When he got close enough that the sword might reach him, Adrissu threw his hand out and sent flames streaming into his face—the man screamed and stumbled back as his skin reddened and bubbled, his sword clattering to the ground. The thudding on the door behind him became more desperate; he pressed his hand to the metal one last time to weld it together as much as he could, then grabbed the downed guard, who again howled in pain as Adrissu’s fiery hand pushed hard into his burned skin. Adrissu killed him quickly, grabbing his sword before hurrying down the hallway into the jail.
“Pollux!” he hissed, glancing between the cells. The two nearest him were empty, but there were at least eight more further down. From the very far end of the wall of cells, he heard Pollux answer faintly.
“I’m here.”
Relief flooded Adrissu at the sound of his voice, and he hurried down to the far cell where he finally saw Pollux, still looking dirty and bloody, with a miserable expression on his face. Luckily, there didn’t seem to be any other prisoners in this jail at the moment—Adrissu suspected that if there had been, they had been moved to a different location in fear of Pollux’s mere presence.
“Are you alright? Are you hurt?” Adrissu asked, reaching through the bars to touch his face. Pollux shook his head, his brow furrowing.
“I’m so sorry, Adrissu,” he said. “I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I’ve ruined everything.”
“Stop,” Adrissu interrupted, shaking his head. “We can talk about all this later. Right now, I have to get you out of here. I need to keep you safe, so we have to leave.”
Pollux’s expression darkened, but he nodded. The pounding on the door reached a fever pitch, and the sound of cracking metal caught both of their attention.
“That won’t hold long,” Adrissu said, grabbing the bars of the cell and ripping them apart with his magic—heat and force flooded them all at once and softened the much thinner pieces of metal. “Listen to me. I’m going to blow a hole in the wall the moment they get that door open. Disguise yourself as an injured guard, and I will do the same. We’ll distract them by sending them out that way, then slip back out the front entrance before they can realize who we are. Alright?”
He could feel Pollux’s tension mounting, but he nodded in response and closed his eyes. His appearance shimmered, and he was a battered-looking human guard the next moment.
